Private forum for recognised mod authors

Something that a few mod authors have brought up recently is that a lot of the staff team here at the Nexus aren't as active within the modding community as we have been in the past. We've been moderating as per normal and dealing with all the reports that come our way but a few folks have felt saddened that some of us haven't been around doing other stuff within the community as much as in the past. It's true many of us have been swallowed up in various real-life and work issues recently. Hopef...

Bethesda would like to see mods happen for consoles

A news article started at Edge that has now made the rounds across the internet has brought to light Bethesda's wish to see mods for Skyrim made available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game. Naturally, Todd Howard's words have been taken out of context and stretched beyond recognition on many forums, but here's the jist of it: It works on all the consoles. As far as the 360 and PS3, right now there’s not an avenue for us to make that available, but we’d very much like to fi...

Tag filters in categories

I have modified the individual category pages to add a search bar and an optional tag filtering system for the specific category you're browsing. Many people often ask us why we don't add more refined categories to the site as they are struggling to find specifics (like armour for males in the armour category, or building mods with quests, etc.) and the answer is generally that we don't want hundreds of categories and sub-categories cluttering the site. Using the tagging system you can really...

DDoS attack on sites [Updated]

Around about 10am today a petulant child who got banned from the site came back with a warning, demanding they be unbanned or they would DDoS the sites until they got their way. Naturally this warning was ignored, as would anyone who made such threats. A little while later the DDoS attacks started and the sites have been up and down a bit. We're no strangers to DDoS attacks, we've had plenty in this site's history so please bare with us while we rectify the actions of a brat. I will say th...

File endorsements in their own discussion topic

Some of you might have noticed that all of the endorsement posts have been moved out of the "Comments" tab on file pages. These posts have not been lost, or deleted, but have instead been moved to a new pinned topic in the "Discussions" tab under the topic listed as the "Official endorsement topic". The aim of this change is to reduce the amount of clutter in the Comments tab and separate normal comments and questions from the standard endorsement messages. To help mod authors manage the c...

Nexus Hiring: PHP web developer and news writer positions

I have just put up a new job opening over in our Jobs section for an experienced PHP web developer. This will be a full-time paid position which is a major step for me, and the Nexus, and will form a part of the on-going improvements being made to the network over the coming months and years. As I've hinted at in recent blog posts I'm coming to the limits of my knowledge, and time, and this year will be a transitional and reformative year for the Nexus as various changes are made to accommoda...

Mods and assets from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I wanted to bring to light some official news from GSC, the creators of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of games, on some information regarding the use of their assets in other games. A few people not in the know have either been using the fact a few mods on the Nexus sites use STALKER assets as an excuse to use assets from other games and mediums or claim that we're some how biased or turning a blind eye to illegal content in some mods. We take reports of the use of illegal content very serious...

File tags and you

Perhaps one of the most under used features on the Nexus sites is the file tagging and searching system. In a nut-shell file tagging allows files to be categorised much more deeply than just being placed in a single category that may contain thousands of files. It's a great way to drill down in to the thousands of mods on the Nexus sites and look for something much more specific using the "Tag Search" link found in the right navigation. There is however an issue with the amount of untagged fi...

Nexus hiring

The hiring process is now closed for the time being. The response to the position has been great and I look forward to working with the people that have been invited in to the role and hopefully, in the near future, showcasing their work to you all :) The Nexus has begun to reach that stage now where one person alone can't do the sites justice. I have some great plans for the future of the network as well as hopes for some more games to add to the Nexus catalogue of sites in the future but in...

New Feature: File requirements

Many files across the Nexus sites depend on other files, official expansions or official DLCs in order for them to work properly. Up until this point the only way for people to find what files a specific mod needs has been to look for the information in the author's file description or in the ReadMe file. Some files have many, many file dependencies and finding all the mods can become a bit of a chore for all involved. The latest feature addition for file authors is a new option in your "Mana...

The Nexus 2.5 Millionth Member Competition

A couple of weeks back the Nexus sites silently recorded their 2 millionth registered member which is a great achievement. As dictated at the last registration milestone, the millionth member, I decided the next milestone would be 2.5 million members, and 5 million members after that, and we're slowly creeping up on that figure day-by-day. Each milestone is greatly coveted by me. The milestones are a trophy for the strong support of the modding communities behind the Elder Scrolls, Fallout an...

Nexus wiki

Recently I've been working in the background on getting an acceptable Wiki in place for use on the sites. As much as the article database integrates in to the sites they're limited in their functionality, especially when it comes to articles that are relevant to more than one site (such as help with the Nexus sites, or certain modding techniques applicable to the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series). The Nexus Wiki is a simple Wiki set up to replace the article database on the sites and provide ...

TES V to be on a new engine

As many will know the Gamebryo formally used by Oblivion and Fallout 3 has been dying a slow death of late. On November 10th 2010 the assets of the engine were put up for sale. Such events have raised questions about Bethesda's choice of engine for TES V and the modability of any new engine that Bethesda might choose to use. The most likely engine candidate was thought to be the id Tech5 engine that is currently being used for the upcoming RAGE game by id as well as the next Doom game. With Z...

Oh my giddy aunt...TES V: Skyrim announced

Oh yes, it's been announced. Those of us who dared to believe already knew the location (because they registered trademarks in the name of Skyrim yonks ago). We already knew it was in development, but we didn't know the release date. It's coming, and it's coming within a year. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was announced by Todd Howard last night at the Spike TV VGA awards to many cheers, a few tears, and a clapping audience. The teaser trailer can be seen on the official site. Do we k...

Amnesia night tonight

Just a reminder for anyone who hasn't noticed the latest site blog that I will be hosting an Amnesia: The Dark Descent demo night tonight. Midnight GMT, 7pm EST time. The premise is simple; people interested can download the demo, download Mumble; the free to download/use VoIP software and log on to my Mumble server and we’ll all play through the demo at our own pace individually. Everyone sets their Mumble to "all talk" so that we can hear everything going on; every person that jumps, ever...

Nexus hacking

It is with both annoyance and regret that I have to announce that I discovered today that the Nexus sites had been compromised through a hole in the site's code. The compromise was serious giving the script kiddy access to all the MySQL databases, including the database for the forums that contains user information such as your email address. I have had reports today from people who have told me that "one-time" accounts used to sign up to the site have been receiving spam. It is my belief tha...

New advanced search filter to sort by usable assets

I have added a new filter to the Advanced Search on the site to allow you to search by files that have their permissions set to "Yes, but you must credit me for all the files you use" or "Yes, no credit or permission needed" under "Users can use assets contained in my files in their own files". This should allow mod authors who are looking for usable assets to quickly find files that have been made open for others to use under certain conditions....

Site statistics

I've been working recently on tallying up all the various "interesting" statistics this site records in to one grand total to get an overall view of the popularity of the sites within the gaming community. I thought it would nice to see just how big this community is and how popular it is to mod the games. I was hoping to use sales figures from the various Bethesda games to come up with a ball-park figure of PC owners who have downloaded and modded their games through the Nexus. Unfortunately...

Multipart upload functionality for large file authors

One of the issues with the Nexus sites has always been the 300mb file size limit for files. It meant that authors with files larger than this amount would have to split the files up in to multiple parts before they could be uploaded to the site. To make matters worse the part names were renamed by the file upload process that screwed up the multipart functionality meaning the end user would have to manually rename the files once they were all downloaded. There was no way of grouping up the parts...

Seattle and Dallas file server down-time

The Seattle and Dallas file servers will be taken down in-turn over the next couple of days while the hard drives are re-jiggled (that's the technical term for it) to double the capacity on the servers. In non-technical terms the RAID on the servers is just being changed from RAID 1 to RAID 0. Redundancy is already provided by the five file servers the sites have so best to make use of all available space. The final 10% of the file server space was taken up quicker than I expected by New Veg...