Mod Page Permissions Update

[Pickysaurus]

Hello everyone!

As you may have read in the November update, we're working hard in the background to battle an increase in both spam and malicious mods being uploaded to the website.

We've been looking into the patterns used by bad actors and how we can best combat them. One trend we've seen frequently is the uploader will disable comments and bugs in an attempt to hide any user feedback which is often warning others away from downloading the content. Similarly, these users will often archive several files on their page and block users from viewing archived files - this act "covers up" the various attempts they've made to evade our security scans. 

To further improve your safety in the community, we've changed the default permissions on mod pages to combat this. 

Starting today, any account that hasn't unlocked Verified Mod Author status will be unable to take the following actions: 

• Disable the Posts section on mod pages.
• Lock comments on mod pages (Coming soon!)
• Disable the Bugs section on mod pages.
• Hide the File Archive on mod pages.

If the feature is not available to you, a message will appear above the section to edit this setting as shown below:

All of these features will unlock automatically when the owner of the page reaches 1,000 Unique Downloads across all of their mods. We feel that by the time your account hits this milestone, we're confident that the content you're sharing is safe enough to allow these parts of the mod page to be turned off.

 

I am not a verified mod author and I've already turned off comments. What will happen to my page?

If your page is already using an alternative option for posts it will remain unchanged. However, you will only be able to change the option to the default when editing your mod. 

 

How do I become a "Verified Mod Author"?

As part of our Mod Author Rewards scheme, you need to achieve 1,000 unique downloads across all of your mods to unlock the first milestone and become verified. 

 

I need to close the comments/bug reports on my mod page but I can't. What can I do?

Please contact a moderator or Community Manager to discuss this issue. Our staff will be able to change this setting before you hit the threshold but this will only be handled on a case-by-case basis. 

[Redawt]

Nice, this hopefully reduces the success of scammers here on Nexusmods.
Good job!

[SCARaw]

awesome

[Xilandro]

It's not gonna work well (to put it mildly). 1000 unique downloads are easy to get just by making some simple mod for currently popular game.

[Gantz79]

I completely agree with @Xilandro reaching the 1000 UDL is as easy as uploading a Reshades, UE Console Variables (.ini), Saved Games, Icon Packs, Image Packs, etc... for some recent game with a small community.

[Dark0ne]

It's about creating barriers to entry for malicious actors. If they have to jump through hoops which take days (to accumulate 1,000+ UDL), rather than minutes (to make new accounts/steal accounts with no previous mod uploads), to spread the links to their viruses that last all of 10-30 minutes up on the site before a moderator removes them then it becomes far more hassle to them than it's worth. Now users can help warn others about the malicious nature of these files, via the comments section, while they wait for moderators to action the reports.

We know what we're doing. We really don't need the negativity.

[kevkas]

I like this, I would suggest keeping track of the 1000 downloads threshold as I suspect that might be a bit too easy to obtain, if that's the case consider increasing it in the future for verifying mod authors (might take them longer to be verified, but it's not the end of the world and helps keep scammy accounts at bay).

[soupdragon1234]

From what I've heard many of these things come from hijacked accounts its one way scammers get around similar restrictions on eBay for example, maybe some additional checks if the account hasn't been active for a number of months/years and suddenly out of the blue they're uploading mods, would be flagged as suspicious something like that.

[cyan49]

That's good, but the problem is that the hacked account is often already a verified mod author, so they will probably first delete all their uploaded mods and post a fake one.

[PinkyDude]

That's a nice step in the right direction!