August holidays, Fileserver to CDN switchover and WYSIWYG editor for descriptions
I'll also do a shout out to a few of you who spotted me at i52 last weekend at the Ricoh Arena. Always slightly odd when randomers shout out "Dark0ne" across a hall, across some tables during board games or drinking with friends at one of the bars but it was great to meet some of you and share some modding stories. Never be afraid to come up and say hello. I'm not a celebrity, just a regular Joe.
Having said that, it's not like we've done nothing this month.
File servers and CDN switchover
During the Steam Summer Sale, and for several weeks afterwards, we experienced issues with our download servers due to the sheer number of people who were coming to the site to get their fill of mods, a problem we didn't originally have due to the fact the sites would crash before the download servers would. We've been working since then on a switch-over to a CDN service used by the likes of Steam and Eve Online so that this will never be an issue again.
Earlier on in the week we released a new version of NMM that makes use of this CDN service and also switched our manual download mechanism over to the CDN service as well. You no longer choose the file server you want to download from, the CDN should automatically select the nearest server they have to your location and serve your file from there. Even if we wanted to there's no mechanism to manually choose what CDN server you download from; our provider has thousands of servers across the globe.
A few people have come on to the forums to say that their download speeds have decreased and a few people have come on to the forums to say their download speeds have increased. We want to give the CDN a chance to balance itself out -- it does have a self-learning process that adapts to the way in which we use the CDN (e.g. the demographics and usage during the time of the day) and it can only learn this information with prolonged use. It needs to learn how we use their resources so it can allocate them accordingly. The hope is within a couple of weeks it will have enough information to sort itself out for everybody.
This update will require another forced update for NMM users which we'll enforce some time next week. This is because we will be decommissioning our complete set of current file servers as they will no longer be used (and frankly, we cannot afford to keep both the old file servers and CDN service running. We'd be paying double for little reason). What we will do, however, is keep the Premium servers. While it's our hope that the CDN will completely fulfill your download needs I've noticed a few Premium Members stating they're getting slower speeds on the CDN (while others are claiming they can now download at 13MB+ a second...) so, out of respect, these will be kept and we'll add the option for Premium Members to use these again at some point soon.
I'd love to hear your feedback on this but please note if you're getting slower download speeds than before then please be patient and give it some time. If it's still just as bad in 2 weeks time then please come back and let us know. One of the programmers was getting terrible speeds to begin with and now it's maxing out his connection consistently.
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor in uploads
Something that's been requested a lot over the years is a decent way to manipulate the BBCode usable in file and image descriptions to make file and image pages look prettier. Lots of mod authors have learnt the code themselves while lots of others have struggled.
We introduced a WYSIWYG to the description fields to help with this. The editor should provide tools to help manipulate your description and show you exactly what it looks like on the page.
It's not been without its bugs, and we know there are still a couple left to squash. If you're really struggling with it/hate it then if you click the "BBCode" button then it'll switch to code-mode, which is basically resetting the form field to how it used to be. No WYSIWYG stuff.
253 comments
Comments locked
A moderator has closed this comment topic for the time beingPLEASE read the site news - there is a new tool to help figure out why some users are experiencing slow speeds ( most are working at least as well as before if not better)
Before that happened though I had downloaded around 20 mods, no problems, no hiccups at all.
Just wanted to let you know. The CDN obviously works well for me. In fact, I think I've stated before that the downloads are faster now, than they have ever been. Those around 20 or so mods that I downloaded, were so quick it gave me time to get up, walk to the kitchen, and pour a glass of milk and walk back. Which before I would not have been able to do, around 20 mods would have taken around 25-30 and sometimes 45 minutes because before it'd either fail or hangups for some odd reason. It no longer does any of that, and things are perfect with the downloads.
I don't know if being a paid user of the site makes any 'major' differences or not, as I just don't understand numbers - but I'm happy with it, nothing to complain about. Thanks.
That's really odd. The only server I can get files from is the Kent premium. Strangely, NMM downloads work fine from the same servers. I only have this problem with manual servers.
Edit- I only use manual download, no NMM.
CDN is not some untried experimental way of doing stuff, it is what most of the big commercial sites use - places like Amazon and Youtube use CDN.
Why are we so late going to CDN? Because it costs much more than the previous expense of having 20 servers scattered in a dozen locations across the US, UK & Europe. Contrary to what some users here seem to think, running a site the size of the Nexus is not free. It is actually is very expensive to give you FREE mods. That is the reason for the advertising. Isn't it nice that advertisers are willing to pay us for your FREE mods so you don't have to?
BTW, We do have a way for you to pay directly and never see the advertising if you prefer. Look at the top of the page for the 'Buy Premium' tab - It comes with some other benefits as well.
Here is a link that describes how a CDN works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
I am in Australia. I'm not downloading as many mods as a few months ago, so it's not impacting me that much.
Still, I downloaded something last week and the average speed was 100 kbps. Today I downloaded the same thing at around 200 kbps. I think this CDN is somehow reconfiguring itself or something. I hope this gets better eventually, before I used to get 750+ kbps average speed.
I was getting around 20kbps and now it's around 50... really hoping this gets fixed soon Xd