It’s been a while since I provided you all with an update on our activities so I thought I’d fire off a “quick” news article on what we’ve got rolling out soon, and in to the future.

Site speed
We’ve been working like badgers since rolling out the new code on Skyim Nexus to get everything refined and optimised for the new code base and to eradicate the slow-downs that have plagued the site and forums over the past few weeks. We think we might have sussed it out now, and we hope that 502 errors and 15 second page loads are now going to be a thing of the past (until we break it again with more code!). If you think we haven’t sussed it, let me know.

Social features
One thing that people said was high on their priority list on Nexus sites was more exposure for mods that have been on the site for a while. One of the ways I thought we could get more exposure for mods was by using the very driving force of this community, that would be you (by the way), to show what’s popular at the moment. What I’m really talking about is quasi-social networking features so you can see what your friends are talking about, what they like at the moment and so on and so forth.

We’ve already rolled these features out on to Fallout 3 Nexus, Dragon Age Nexus, Neverwinter Nexus and Mount & Blade Nexus and more sites will follow soon. At the moment the features are at a base level, and we hope to expand upon them over the coming months. So don’t be disheartened if you think it’s rather limited at the moment, we’ll continue to develop it based on your feedback.

We’ve changed the front pages of these sites to show “feeds” that you can pick from. You have a feed for activity on your tracked files, a feed to show what your friends have been up to recently and also a new feed for “File news”...

File news
One thing we wanted to allow mod authors to do was get the word out on new features they have added to their mods, or perhaps send out a pre-emptive heads up about what’s being worked on at the moment (much like this news post). With that in mind we’ve added an “Articles” features to all files in the database.

If you’re a mod author you will be able to write news articles for your files, and these will show in a new tab on your file pages, and will also show up in the “File news” tab on the front of the site. So if you’ve got something new you’d like to mention about your mod or if you want to ask your users questions and get feedback then you can write up a news article for everyone to see. Each article has its own forum thread, so your article comments are kept separate from the rest of your file. You can write these articles by clicking on the “Articles” link from your mod management page.

To prevent authors from “spamming” the front page file news feed with news posts for the same files only one article will show from your file within a 48 hour period. So if you write 3 articles within the space of a few hours, only one will show on the news feed on the front page.

You can start writing articles right now on sites that have already had these social features added to them.

Nexus Mod Manager
We’re getting close to having 750,000 unique users of the Nexus Mod Manager and today we released version 0.18.8 of NMM, which contained a few bug fixes, including a fix for the scripting issues.

We’re currently working on two new major features for NMM that have been begged for since we released the program last November; categories and profiling. Categories will enable you to organise your mod lists better, placing mods in to your own categories or allowing NMM to manage your categories for you based on the category the mod is in on the site. Profiling will enable you to create specific load customisations for your gaming; so Profile 1 might contain Mods A, B and C while Profile 2 might contain Mods B, C, X, Y and Z. When you start the game you can choose which profile to load.

Downloading and uploading
We’re working on overhauling both our current manual and NMM downloading system to be much better, faster, more efficient and more stable. I’ll talk about what we’ll be rolling out in the not too distant future, but rest assured that we are looking at it. We’re also looking in to making our uploads resumable so you can stop and start your mod uploads and restart from where you left off if your computer or browser crashes or your internet drops.

So that’s just a glimpse at what we’re working on at the moment. Over the next couple of weeks the social network features should be rolled out to all the sites and you can begin to test them out and see what needs improving.