October 2023 Update Notes

[Demorphic]

Welcome to a general product update for Nexus Mods in October. We hope to make this a regular monthly feature, based on your feedback. The aim is to give you more insight into what has gone live and what you can expect to be going live.

What’s new at Nexus Mods? During October, the team has been working on a bunch of features, some of which have been rolled out, while others are part of our larger website and forum redesign projects. This means a lot of the work currently being undertaken is not yet reaching the live site and will not for quite some time.

Some small visible changes that have hit the live site

• We made improvements and fixed some bugs for the new optional ‘Blur adult media’ setting found in the user’s site preferences. (This is the most-requested feature on our feedback board).
• We recently changed our ad provider and have been working on integrating them to the site. We are working on improving the quality and relevance of our ads. This is ongoing as we bring new advertisers on board.
• Our ‘Premium’ adverts now better highlight our commitment to mod author donations.
• We have some new hires in the team, they have been added to the team page.
• The bot prevention solution on our login and register pages has been changed to Cloudflare Turnstile, which removes the annoying image select challenges.
• The ‘Get Vortex’ pop-up has been removed from Collection pages. This is due to the format of the pop-up. Vortex is still our recommended mod manager.
• Updated the default cloudflare error page. The page is now better formatted and includes a link to our first iteration of our Status Page. This is the first iteration of the page, which is work in progress.

A bunch of bug fixes

• Random users should no longer get informal warnings when they haven’t actually been given one. This was happening when the website was experiencing periods of heavy load.
• Fixed a bug that stopped users from updating their site settings.
• Fixed a bug that was stopping users who had not logged-in recently (in the last six months) from logging in.
• Fixed an issue with the dismiss button on some adverts, which was making it hard to close ads.
• Fixed a bug that had broken the image zoom feature.
• Fixed the “New articles on mod page” notification to use the correct URL. (We are currently working on other related notification issues).

Forums Project

Project ‘Phoenix’ is our ongoing work to update the Nexus Mods forums. The current forums have been live and minimally updated for close to 20 years. They are heavily bound to our site and other services, making it incredibly difficult to add or update forum functionality.

Our aim is to bring the forums up to a current version and untie them from other parts of our site. None of this work will be visible yet, we plan on rolling it all out in a future update.

• Full evaluation of Invision Board version 4.
• Evaluated the search feature in the new version.
• Researched how to update users in the new forum when they are updated on Nexus Mods. For example, making sure they show as ‘Premium’ or ‘Supporter’.
• Researched how to maintain existing moderation reporting tools in the new forums (Mods, Images, Comments, etc.) reported on Nexus Mods.
• Procured production hosting environments for the new forums.
• Moved user avatars from the old forum into a new dedicated storage.
• Reduced the amount of data being moved from the old forum into the new one. This is mostly ‘hidden’ data and will result in less downtime.
• Formal warnings and bans will now be posted into the new forum.
• Tested a new forum structure, to better group content with more effective search and discovery.

Notifications Project

Extensive work is taking place on our notification system, currently not visible to site users. Notifications are a heavily used and valuable tool for both mod authors and mod users. There are currently over 60 notification types. Our objective is to update and improve this service. The following work has been taking place:

• Work on a new dedicated page for managing your notifications.
• Working to ensure notifications will be accessible on both the current and new site.
• Created a script to migrate all existing notifications to our new service. All existing notifications are now feeding into the new service.
• Added lots of useful metrics and logging to our new service.
• Various bits of work on our API to retrieve and manage a user’s notifications.
• Restructured the notifications data in the new service to reduce complexity.

Website Redesign Project

Much of the website is outdated and running on very old tech. As our number of site users and mod content has increased, the site is groaning under the pressure. A large amount of work is going on to bring the whole site up-to-date. Our newer collections pages are an example of this transition to the new site. Much is still left to be done.

We’ll be taking a phased and gradual approach to this, so that we can get lots of feedback before committing to any changes. None of this work will be visible yet, but we’ll be opening it up to users as an opt-in beta soon. This month:

Started work on a new homepage for logged-out users visiting the site for the first time, including:

• a section detailing the benefits of joining Nexus Mods to access mods.
• a section detailing the benefits of uploading your content to Nexus Mods.
• a section showcasing which games we have content for on Nexus Mods.

Started work on a new homepage for logged-in users who are returning to Nexus Mods, including:

• a section allowing users to manage their bookmarked (favourite) games.
• a section showing mods for your bookmarked games.
• a section showing collections for your bookmarked games.
• a section showing media for your bookmarked games.
• a section showing recent news from Nexus Mods.

Finished work on a new games list page, including:

• Searching for games.
• Filtering and sorting games.

Other behind-the-scenes website work:

• Quickly viewing the number of mods and collections available per game.
• Created a new filter for filtering mods by Author/Uploader, which will be used later when we start building mod list pages.
• Created a new filter for filtering mods by File Size, Downloads and Endorsements, which will be used later when we start building mod list pages.
• Created a time filter for mods, collections and media on the new game page. We mostly finished work on a new game page a couple of months ago.
• Researched how we can update our search, so that it returns all types of content for a keyword search (i.e. games, mods, collections, users, etc.)

Nexus Mods App

The Nexus Mods App (our future mod installer, creator and manager for all your popular games) is in active, early-stage development, currently at version 0.2. The app team is working closely with community in the app development. The team have been working on the following:

• Install Mod Installers (FOMODs) (for Skyrim / Skyrim SE)
• Launch Skyrim (LE & SE) with FOMODs working
• Add UI translation data (i.e. Localisation)
• Opt-in/out of data gathering (i.e. Diagnostics/Telemetery)
• Manually install mods (for all games)
• Update the app (v0.1 -> v0.2)

In Summary

All of the above projects are significant in scope. The updated forums are likely to be completed first. More detailed context will accompany the move to these going live. Our community of users are actively involved in most aspects of this development. If you are interested in getting involved, we highly value all community feedback and a good place to start is our Discord server, our forums or our feedback board.

Was this useful? Our plan is to do a regular monthly update in a ‘patch notes’ style. If you have any feedback on the content or approach, please share it.

Our public roadmap is visible here, and while it doesn’t show everything being worked on, it details many of our user-facing priorities.