Wingyl

Actually, come to think of it...completely setting aside how bad the graphics and site design is, how it's a pointless extra annoyance, and how it makes the site look like MEGAUPLOAD and other highly shady probably-doing-something-illegal-on-the-side filesharing sites instead of its old trustworthy-looking design... A lifetime membership is something like $60 US. (Exact price depends on payment method.) If a premium member uses up more than $60 of bandwidth on the site, ever, they have cost more than you got from them. And one of the major selling points Nexus is using for going premium is something that was a free feature three days ago. And you can't turn off images: waste of bandwidth. Lots of extra pages for free users: More bandwidth. You'd constantly need evermore premium users, all using less than $60 lifetime bandwidth on this site ever. Less, if free users didn't pay for themselves with ads and donation points. Since ads on this site have been shady before and there is no indication they've been fixed since, users have no reason to believe it's safe to turn off adblocker and the "plz pay us $2" thing comes across not as "please support us" and more "if you pay us money we will stop trying to guilt-trip you for not endangering your computer". Even if you assume everyone pays their $2 "don't show content that is reasonably likely to be malicious" fee, you're still assuming that they either use less than or equal to $2 of bandwidth ever, or that your premium memberships can cover it. And the images alone probably eat that $60 up real quick, so you'd need to constantly get more and more and more premium users like some kind of multi-level-marketing scam just to cover the costs of the other premium users. Alternatively you could use an Archive of Our Own or Wikipedia style donation drive thing and not need a constant stream of premium users, especially if you reduce bandwidth costs by letting us have options to see less images if we wanted to. (Do not lock these behind a paywall, some mods are just reskins.) Hell, if you have ads that are actually safe to view, let us report ads that slip through your curation, and make it clear that the ads have actually been curated at all rather than being a pile of malware and violations of website design, people will actually turn their adblockers off and you'd probably get more money in the long term from the ads than you got from the occasional $2 basically-protection-money from people who don't have adblockers.

Honestly...you want more money? Do it like AO3, with donation drives and incentives. That's a user-friendly way to get funding and AO3 tends to meet its 100k+ goal in like two days so it's clearly effective. This thing is user-hostile. It actively makes users deal with garbage extra screens and offers a "premium" membership that, frankly, looks like an overall step DOWN. Everyone defending it seems to be talking about how it's cheap (true, but the that's not the point, the point is the bad site design, also there are better ways to fundraise) or about how the download speed cap is not new (also not the point, the point is the user-hostile site design change). Nobody defending it is defending the unnecessary and rude extra pages, the lack of any reason to believe it's safe to turn off your adblocker, the trying to punish users into paying Nexus money, the bad premium features, the bad graphics design, the pointless 5-second wait time that was there for a while, or the fact that at least some supporters have still been seeing ads and therefore not getting what they paid for.

Recent changes: The changes to the download system are bad. If you're not using a premium account, as of today it forces you to look at an advert for the premium option after hitting Download. AFTER you have already certainly seen the notification that your download speed is capped. This is obnoxious and isn't likely to make you gain any users; it's just punishing people and promising to remove some of the punishment if you cough up money. Incidentally the graphic design of that screen, taken by itself, implies that you are to pay individually for every premium download and get that annoying screen that makes you pick every. time. Highly rude, knock it off. Also, the automatic downloads thing sounds like a Bad Idea. It's mods. Automatic downloads of mod updates sound great until someone uploads a version with 0 backwards compatibilty for the public beta and you're still running the latest stable release. Or any other situation where auto-download will break your game. There was a Stardew mod for a while where you had to use the second-newest version because the newest broke on the stable releases of the game while the second-newest ran perfectly; automatic downloads, more like instant crashbugs. There's mods where there's two or three versions on the same mods page and they all have different versioning. Bad enough getting constant modloader update notifications; worse having it download the file-replacer that's two years old and will crash your game because it had a higher version number than the other version of the mod. Or, for that matter: optional downloads. You're playing with the lighter version of some mod, it updates, you have premium, it downloads all versions and they clash with each other or cause major annoying terrain changes and you have to manually uninstall something you never would have downloaded, like IF2R from SVE if you use any other farm map at all. (It still breaks forage totally if you have IF2R installed and aren't using it.) And then there's mods with complicated install instructions. Even if it only downloads to your downloads folder, not trying to put the mods in the mods folders, it's still taking away your control over your downloads and wasting data and your time making you delete stuff you don't want and would not have voluntarily downloaded, like optional files you don't want and updates for mods you no longer use. Seriously, nexus staff, why would you think that automatic downloads are anything but a very firm reason you should never use premium? That's not a selling point, that's an anti-selling-point! It's a reason to not pay! It's punishing users for using premium, while you also punish them for not using premium! As for ads... It's not safe to go on the internet without an adblocker anymore. Too many ads have malware or use absurd amounts of memory or CPU power or autoplay video or sound or get in the way. I've seen people talking about ads that mine cryptocurrency with the viewer's computer. Adblockers are pretty much alongside firewalls and antiviruses these days. I started using an adblocker permanently except on specific whitelisted sites that are either on a heavily curated "known safe" list or have strong ad curation programs that are shown to the user, mentioned somewhere hard to miss, and allow user participation to blacklist and permenently remove specific ads from the site for everyone. So far that's about three sites. Meanwhile sites that try to force you to turn off adblocker are generally the ones that are most likely to run actively damaging ads. The reason I started using adblockers was because a news site that did that ran an ad that completely prevented the news page from finishing loading and caused unrelated, adless, wikipedia tabs to crash. I cannot remember if my antivirus caught anything. I do know that if I ever end up turning my adblocker off and even accidentally going to or refreshing a site that isn't in my whitelist, I immediately run a full virus scan. It's already caught one once, from a newspaper.