We wanted to give you all a heads-up that over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be making some changes to how things work on Nexus Mods in regards to Adult content, child safety online and our ongoing commitment to remove illegal content.

These updates are part of our legal obligation to comply with the UK government’s new Online Safety Act and the EU’s Digital Services Act, along with the guidance being issued by Ofcom (the UK’s regulator).

While we’re required to make these changes under new UK and EU laws, they also give us the opportunity to improve how content is managed on the site. These updates aim to give users more control, protect vulnerable audiences, and ensure Nexus Mods remains a platform that can support all types of content responsibly.


Why Are We Making Changes?

Due to the Online Safety Act and Digital Services Act, we are required as a UK-based company to ensure we continue to remove illegal content and add additional restrictions to children’s access to certain adult content.

As a business, this leaves us with a choice: 

• Remove adult content for all UK and EU-based users. 
• Make adjustments to our policy, including adding age verification for some adult content. 
  

Adult content is a core part of what makes Nexus Mods what it is; we don’t consider removing it a viable option. We are aware that some users may find the changes irritating; however, we are obligated to do this to ensure we can continue to host adult content legally. 


What’s Changing?

Some of this is still being worked out behind the scenes, so we won’t go into too much technical detail just yet. We’ll be updating you when we have a finalised and revised version of the Adult Content Guidelines.

In the meantime, here’s a general overview of what you can expect:


Illegal Content

We’re updating our Terms of Service to include a clearer, more detailed definition of what counts as illegal content under UK law and how we protect children from harm whilst on the site. While this kind of content was already not allowed on the site, we’re tightening the language to be absolutely clear. All users will be notified when the Terms of Service are updated.

We’re also introducing automated detection for Child Sexual Abuse Material. Any content of this nature will be immediately removed, and the user responsible will be banned and reported to the National Crime Agency.


Categorisation and Tags 

We’re overhauling our adult content guidelines to provide more detail and better categorisation. These tags can be added by our moderators and staff and will be locked in place once added. Of course, this does not change the ability mod authors have to tag their mods and users' ability to vote on tags.

The revised tags you will see for adult content are: 

• Pornographic
• Extreme Violence
• Harmful substances
• Suicide
• Self-harm
• Depression
• Body stigma
• Eating disorders
  

• Swearing or Profanity
• Sexualised 
  

If you’ve enabled adult content on your account, you’ll be able to choose which categories you want to see or hide using the new system. This will give you more control over your experience on the site.


Image Share

For now, images will remain mostly unchanged. Images which contain Pornographic content or contain Extreme violence must be posted to the supporter image share. We will be looking at tidying up the image upload form to make the rules clearer and less confusing. 


User Controls and Blocking

We’re rebuilding the existing block and mute systems to make them clearer and more effective.

• A new “Ignore” feature is already in place and has replaced the old “Blocked Authors” system, hiding all content (including notifications) from users you’ve ignored. This should help make the features clearer, as we previously had two “Block” features that functioned differently.
• Mod author’s ability to block specific users from interacting with their content if they have negatively interacted with it before will remain unchanged. 
• People you’ve blocked from your media will still be able to view it, but they won’t be able to leave comments or interact with it in other ways.
• Collection curators will also be able to block users from interacting with their collections; however, they will still be able to view and download them.
• Mod authors will benefit from the improvements to blocking users, which previously did not cover all of the ways you could be contacted by a user on the site. 
  

Other Updates

• Our automated spam detection system will be expanded to more areas of the site, including comments, which will be manually reviewed by staff/moderators. 
• We’re changing the contributor system for mods so that contributors will need to be invited, which ties into the new Ignore system.
• Articles for mods containing adult content now have the same checks as the mod pages themselves.
  

Does Age Verification Affect You? 

For UK and EU-based users: 

• In the future, we will be introducing age verification for the majority of adult content hosted on the site. The specifics of this are being carefully considered as we want to get this right so that the option to view adult content remains available to adults, whilst fulfilling our legal obligation to ensure children are safe on our website. 
  

For Everyone Else: 

• You will not be subject to age verification. The current approach to verifying you are above 18 years of age will remain the same unless we are legally required to change this to operate in your country. 
  

What To Expect Next

Some of these changes are live already and will be detailed in the next monthly roundup, while others will roll out gradually over the coming weeks and months. We’ll do our best to make the transition as smooth as possible, but we understand this may cause some disruption.

We want to be clear that these changes are not optional for us. They are part of complying with legislation, and we are committed to keeping our platform safe for everyone.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we go through this process, and as always, we’ll be sure to keep you informed as things develop.