Since we all came back into the office, we’ve hit the ground running and here are some of the things we’ve been working away on in January.
New Bonus Rewards System
We have created a new Bonus Rewards System to reward positive, highly influential authors, who are responsible for making the critical tools and utilities that allow modding to thrive.
Whilst in the system, authors will receive a set amount of DP per month in addition to their usual DP rewards. This system is separate from the normal Donation Point system and is manually decided by Nexus Mods. The first of these payments has gone out already, paying these incredible contributors an additional $16,450 between them on top of the DP system.
We will be regularly reviewing the Bonus Reward System, to ensure that both the included authors and the payout amounts are appropriate. We will be considering other mod authors for future payouts as game popularity and modding habits change.
Updated Webpages - Open Beta Coming Soon
We are making changes to parts of the site that have not been updated for over a decade. This is part of our ongoing plan to improve your website experience when browsing or searching for content.
Later this week you will see a banner on the site, simply click the "Join Beta" button on the banner at the top of the changed pages and your device will be opted in.
We can’t wait for you to see the new pages and we hope you enjoy the changes, which we will detail in full once the beta is released.
General
- Unverified Mod Authors: Unverified mod authors can no longer lock or hide comments, hide file archives, or hide the bug reporting tab. These settings are unlocked once authors become verified (requiring 1,000 unique downloads). The reason for this change is due to an increased amount of malicious files being linked to from the site. The uploaders of these files attempt to disguise this fact by hiding all comments.
- Spam Detection: We’ve made further improvements to our spam detection system, which now also covers user profiles. Users found abusing the system will be automatically banned. If you believe you’ve been banned in error, please contact [email protected].
- Premium User Profile Updates: User profiles now include a premium-only “Results per page” option. Premium users can select 20, 40, 60, or 80 results within the ‘Mods’, ‘Media’, and ‘Collections’ tabs.
- Mod Comment Search: We've had to, unfortunately, disable our mod comment search feature. Find out more here.
Content
Don’t forget, our Valentine’s Screen Archery Competition launched last week. We’re offering prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, and we can’t wait to see what you all come up with for this theme!
As a team, we’d also love to hear what other competitions you’d like to see from us in the future. We want to make sure everyone in our community has the opportunity to get involved and have fun. So please let us know in the comments, or feel free to message me with your ideas.
Modsetti will be launching a new outreach campaign for game developers later this week. She’ll provide more information about it in her own news post on Thursday.
We also have some very exciting news, over the coming weeks, the Content and Community teams will be moving into a new office space! This means we’ll have a dedicated content room where we can start creating in-house content, including podcasts, roundtables, streaming, and more.
Tech Talk
A big chunk of the work we have been doing this month as a team has been to improve our website stability. A solid and reliable platform is our number one priority. We’ve made significant progress in reducing errors across the site, cutting them by 90% since our last update. This work continues, in order to ensure a smoother, more stable experience for everyone.
Thanks for your patience while this work has been going on. An unfortunate part of working towards long-term stability is often short-term outages as our infrastructure is updated.
- Symfony: We’ve migrated key pages to Symfony, our new web framework. This change will help us deliver faster updates and improvements to the site.
- Varnish Caching: This has been rolled out across key pages, enhancing site performance and resilience, especially during high-traffic periods.
- Redis load: Started work on reducing Redis load to minimise issues during busy times.
- AMQP decoupling: Improved site stability during high usage by decoupling AMQP for download and page view stats (stats may update more slowly now though as the payoff of this).
- CPU usage: Optimised infrastructure-level CPU usage in development and staging environments.
- Upload services: Enhanced error visibility and cleared the backlog of failed uploads. Further improvements are planned.
- Playwright update: Upgraded the version of our automated testing platform to ensure smoother testing processes.
Eww, Bugs
- 524 errors: Resolved an issue causing large numbers of these errors, reducing them to nearly zero.
- Collection bug reports: Fixed success messages not appearing after submission.
- Mod sorting: Resolved an issue with mods not sorting alphabetically on user profiles.
- Site preferences: Fixed toggles not updating or showing the correct state.
- Forum messages: Corrected an error preventing messages from being sent.
- Notifications: Fixed the ‘View All’ link returning errors.
- Locked comments: Corrected a typo in the locked comments message on collections.
- Collection revisions: Resolved an error when navigating to revisions.
- Profile stats: Fixed issues with unique download counts and delayed mod author rewards.
- Collection comments: Fixed an issue with direct links returning errors.
- Moderation tools: Fixed reports not showing which game they were related to.
- Collection categories: Fixed an issue preventing curators from editing or setting categories on collections.
- Media uploads: Resolved a bug preventing users from uploading images and videos.
Nexus Mods App
The app has gone through three more releases since November, bringing a tonne of new features and improvements. The Collections feature is really taking shape with collections now displayed in the Library, a dedicated collection download page, and toggles in the left menu to easily enable or disable entire collections.
Our team has been hard at work bringing you the following updates too:
- UI/UX Enhancements: We've rolled out new designs for key pages, incorporating our refreshed branding. You'll now see the selected/active state for items in the left menu, along with stylish new mod images on list pages.
- Improved Error Handling: A new pop-up now alerts users to unexpected errors, providing clearer information when something goes wrong.
- Cyberpunk Load Order UI: The REDmod Load Order page has been given a facelift and lays the groundwork for other load order pages.
- Support for Bannerlord Software Extender: We've expanded support for Bannerlord to include BLSE.
We've got some great news for early adopters! You can update from 0.7.0+ without losing your mods, games and other settings.
Our focus now is getting the app ready for the Stardew Valley Preview, keep an eye on the site news for more information on this soon.
As always, keep your feedback coming; we’ll bring more updates next month!
40 comments
Like a mod has the tag translation that is normally English will be hidden too because you hid that tag.
I also look forward to seeing what your Beta program includes. Your last beta program ended up with many positive changes for your site.
While I can't give specifics, this is not a permanent removal.
Post script: Thinking about it more (this is 15 or 20 year old memory from back when I was a lead designer in ANSI C++ banking systems), there are two types of databases: a) those which are pre-indexed to optimize speed and performance (that's what I used), and b) those for which indexes can be created on demand. The latter has much less performance capability but is useful for reporting systems, which in theory you can treat Nexus Mods databases to be. I don't quite remember the names of those two systems (it's been too many years). But if you're using the latter system, you can probably pull it off, though you'll always be a bit handicapped on retrieval speed compared to pre-indexed systems.
Great updates to the site too, awesome work as always! Nexus feels so.. involved these days! Not just a site to host files, but an active part of the community, posting content like videos, being present in social media, hosting contests. I love it all!
Happy to check out the beta for the Mod Browsing as well!
We’re really glad our efforts to connect with our community here more comes across that way. It’s something we’re really passionately working on and hope to continue to improve!
Cheer up team!
I'd like to know if one of my mod is eligible for it.