We've passed a few milestones over the past couple of weeks so I thought that now would be a great time to announce them along with a belated birthday present for the sites.

August marked the 11th birthday of the Nexus sites in its varying forms. From Morrowind Chronicles, to Morrowind Source, TESSource and Skyrim Nexus and everything in between these sites have been up and running for over 11 years now. I've said it before and I'll say it again; the principle goal when I first started hosting mods for Morrowind back in 2003 (before that Morrowind Chronicles was a Morrowind fansite and forum community) was to provide a modder's resource that people could rely on to still be up in the future. 2002-2004 was a turbulent time in the Elder Scrolls modding community as many mod hosts failed to keep up with demand (Morrowind Files, EuroMorrowing, Morrowind Mods et al) so I really wanted to provide a resource that mod authors could trust to stick around. I stuck in there, despite people telling me that the NewsCorp funded FilePlanet would always outlast whatever I did (ironic, no?) and I think I've realised that goal.

As if fate smiled upon the birthday we also reached a milestone of over 1 million unique downloads for the Nexus Mod Manager. We launched the Nexus Mod Manager last year, on the 15th of November, so we've managed to hit over 1 million downloads in just over 9 months. It's a great achievement and one I'm really proud of. I'm happy so many people are enjoying and making use of what we've managed to get out there, and we've got lots in store. Happy Birthday to the Nexus.

Our timing has been a little off, and it's taken us a bit longer than anticipated, but we're very close to finalising our work on the new download mechanism for the sites and for NMM. Some people have been reporting some sporadic issues when downloading from the sites or through NMM and we're hoping that this new system will sort that out.

When we set out planning the new download system we wanted to release something that would benefit both normal members and Premium Members alike and we think we've got it right. Premium Members are the life-blood of these sites and without them we could not afford our mounting expenses (currently at $25,000/month and growing monthly), so I'm always glad when we can add something to the Premium experience.

With the new download system your downloads are balanced across our entire file server network (currently 10 file servers). Non-premium members are capped at a download speed of 1MB/second (8mbit) across all their downloads. If you download 1 file, you'll be able to download at a maximum of 1MB/second. If you download 2 files, you'll download at 500kb/second for each file. 4 downloads would be 250kb/sec per file. And so on and so forth. Premium members are obviously uncapped and will be able to download as fast as their connections allow. We've also added another Premium-only download server in the US for their use.

All downloads have been opened up to download manager support, or even simple pause/resume functionality using the built in browser download mediums whether you're a Premium Member or not. This will now *fingers crossed* mean that if you get cut-off or the server drops half way through your download you'll be able to resume it from where you left off. If you're not a premium member you'll still be limited to 1MB/sec download speeds and you'll only be allowed to download 1 chunk per file, even if you use a download manager, but you'll have greater control over your downloads. Premium Members will be able to download files using multiple chunks/threads per file, even on the non-Premium-only servers, and thus get speeds as fast as possible. We still highly recommend using DownThemAll! if you're a FireFox user as this is the download manager that requires the least fuss when used in conjunction with the Nexus. We've also tested the system with GetRight and can confirm it works, but it requires a couple of settings tweaks which we'll write a tutorial for in due time.

Over the coming weeks we'll be updating the Nexus Mod Manager to take in to account these new download changes and we'll try to make it as obvious as possible in the download manager how fast you're downloading and whether you're hitting your download speed limits. The hope is to entice some of you to part with your hard-earned cash to help us out a little; not just with the server expenses but with bringing on more professional help to make these sites the best they can be. We've got 3 people working full-time on the sites now. 2 on the sites, 1 on NMM. And we'd like more. I'd never jeopardise the future of the sites by overspending, however, so can only get more people on-board if the cash flow is right.