TESNexus traffic soars 25% after Steam promotion

The total daily unique visitors on TESNexus soared by 25% on normal figures this weekend (12th/13th of June) after popular gaming platform Steam launched a special Game of the Year promotion of Oblivion and Morrowind respectively. As a result TESNexus had its most popular weekend ever with back-to-back figures of 113,000 and 123,000 unique visitors achieved on Saturday and Sunday with a total of just over 300,000 files downloaded and 2.6 million page views. Registrations almost doubled from t...

Site down-time and corrupted download table

I brought down the site for a few minutes this afternoon at 2:50pm GMT to repair a broken table in the database that stored all the download history data for user accounts. The table has been repaired and the database has been speed optimised during the downtime. The table corruption means that anyone trying to endorse a file recently off the site may find that the file won't allow them to do it as their original download wasn't recorded by the site. In order to fix this you'll need to go thr...

Aesthetic changes to top area

The top area of all the Nexus sites has been updated today. There's been some rearranging of the top menu, the title images have been spruced up a bit, some cliche gradients have been added for uber coolness and, yes, that's another advertisement I'm afraid. A 728x90 leaderboard ad has been added to the top right of the site. I'm hoping the additional funds gained from the placement will help to secure the necessary money needed to support an additional site should Obsidian release an SDK for...

Download service resumed

Around 4am GMT this morning the download service on the site stopped working. My server provider was working on their infastructure around this time and managed to bring down the hard-drives that store all the files on the site. Service is now back up and working again and I apologise for this issue. Thank you to the 300+ people who emailed me over the past 6 hours letting me know! ...

Known issues with the file servers

I am aware of an issue with the file servers at the moment that is seriously affecting file delivery for normal members. One of the file servers has been throttled at 100mbit rather than 1gbit at the ISP for some reason this weekend and I'm in contact with them about getting it fixed. That's putting undue pressure on the other file servers and coupled with a particularly busy weekend (190,000 unique visitors yesterday and 250,000, so more than 2.2 visitor/downloads a second) has brought the ...

New member bar with chat functionality

I have just enabled a new member bar feature on the Nexus sites and the forums that is going to be running through beta over the next couple of days. Before I say anything let me waylay your initial gulp reaction after you first saw it; you haven't picked up a malware toolbar off the internet! This is legit ;) The toolbar will display for any members that are logged in to the sites or the forums and it syncs with the forums. You can turn the bar off in your preferences area if you don't want ...

Posting reputation: let the community moderate itself

I have added a new reputation system to file and image comments on all the Nexus sites. This new system is a "plus or minus" system similar to the current rating system except that minus points can actually have consequences to the post. It is visible on all file and image comments to the right of the comment date. If you like a post you plus rep it by clicking the thumbs up icon and the post will instantly gain a reputation point. If you don't like the post, if you think it's a troll post o...

New Supporter member group and Image Share section

After reading through the feedback provided by the community on my last news post I decided to return to the confines of the private Nexus staff forums to listen to the council of my fellow staff members and discuss viable solutions. Today I've decided to go ahead with my plans and we'll see how it goes. To start with I have created a new paid for member group known as a "Supporter". Supporters are either people who have paid a one-off fee of £1 to become a Supporter of the site or are past ...

Announcing Adult Nexus in development

I'd like to take this time to announce some new spin-offs to the Nexus sites labeled Adult TESNexus, Adult Fallout 3 Nexus and Adult Dragon Age Nexus that are currently being developed. While these sites are not finished I'm announcing them now to gauge community response and receive feedback on what possible users would like to see from the sites. While I can't fulfill all requests I always learn a lot and get lots of great ideas for future site features from these sorts of feedback sessions. ...

Terms of Service update for the sites and forum

The Terms of Service for all Nexus sites and the forums have been updated today with some important changes to rules on file and image uploads and general etiquette. A new section has been added on Uploading files and images (click to go straight to the relevant area) that clearly sets out in writing what we do and don't allow on the Nexus sites. Many of these rules have been enforced for years but they've never been properly set out in the Terms of Service, making things slightly "grey" for ...

Download speeds question for US members

I would be interested to know what sort of download speeds US members are getting on the file server nearest to their location. Obviously normal members are capped at a maximum of 500kb/sec but I'd like to know how close people are getting to this figure in contrast to their actual download speed and their location. If you'd like to share this information please let me know as it would help me better understand the needs of you all. Please provide your general location (the State you are livi...

New EU file server now available

There is now a new 100mbit file server available to all members located in Maidenhead, England. Obviously this server will benefit the European visitors of the Nexus sites and I will be closely monitoring the bandwidth throughout the day to insure the server isn't being saturated. The file servers are being reshuffled and this is the last month that the two Washington file servers in the US will be operational. Both the Dallas and Seattle servers have been upgraded to Gigabit lines and while ...

Changes to the "Updates today" page

I have made both aesthetic and functional changes to the "Updates today" page on all Nexus sites this evening. Aesthetically each row of content has been given a slightly different background colour so you can more easily line up the content (such as the edits made and time the edit was made) for each file name. A new function has been added above the usual "Edited files" block that allows you to filter the list of edited files based on the edits made. This is handy as you can now simply l...

Aesthetic changes to file pages

The file database on all Nexus sites has been updated with a new aethsetic look and rearranging in both categories and file entries. The image gallery now works in a similar way to the "Hot files" box, showing images that the owner of the file has uploaded (and not images by other users)....

GameStop added as affiliate

GameStop has now been added to the list of affiliates available to purchase from in our affiliate store. GameStop are one of the largest video game retailers in the US so if you're planning to buy any games in the near future, or pre-order Fallout: New Vegas, for example, then you might like to do it through them. A big thank you to the people who have been using the affiliate links to buy items online and a reminder, as I get asked this a lot, that you don't need to just use the links for bu...

Front page changes

The front page on all three Nexus sites has been updated and completely reworked to better suit file sites such as these. The site news has been moved below the new content blocks and the webmaster's blog will be relocated in due course. For those wondering how hot files are chosen; the top 5 files are picked once per day from the top 25 recently endorsed files of the past 21 days. Adult only files are not included in the mix and (obviously) only files with images are accepted. If you're a fi...

Affiliate store launched

A little over a week ago I asked people on the site where they bought their video games and hardware from online. The aim was to create an affiliate store of the most popular gaming and hardware outlets in the States and Europe for people to buy products from via the Nexus sites. The point of this is very simple; buying products from the selected affiliates on the site provides the Nexus sites with a small but valuable commision on all the goods you buy. Do you buy your games from Amazon? Gre...

Vote for Bethesda at The Escapist

Each year The Escapist (best known for their weekly "Zero Punctuation" column) run a people's choice competition of the biggest game developers in the world. Members of the site vote for their favourite developers in "rounds" against other developers and in the latest round Bethesda have come up against Valve, creators of all those games you love to hate (and I guess enjoy). If you'd like to help Bethesda out in a match-up they're clearly underdogs for then head on over to the voting page and...

Most endorsed recently added files

There is now a new Top 25 page available on all Nexus sites in the top lists that displays the most endorsed files that have been recently added to the site. You can filter the results from between 1 day and 60 days since the addition of the file. You can use this tool to check out the up-and-coming new files on the site and it can be found under Top 100 -> Most endorsed recently added files....

Where do you buy your games and hardware?

Many major online retailers have an affiliate system linked to them by which they offer small percentage based commissions to sites that refers paying customers to them. Take for example a site like Amazon. If you click a link on someone's website to Amazon and then proceed to buy something off the site the referring website will be given a small percentage of the total sale in commission. You don't pay extra. You don't do anything differently. You don't even know you've done it. But a commissio...