Prevent Author Spam of the Hot Files

[TateTaylorOH]

Recently there has been a few incidents of a single author with a single series of mods taking over the hot files. The Dragon Enigma was a series of mods by Satafinix that was posted towards the end of February and at the height of his time on the Hot Files Satafinix mods occupied four of the seven spots on the Hot Files. Currently JK has four of his Whiterun interior overhauls occupying the frontpage.

https://imgur.com/fXaA3yo

In my opinion this is an issue, regardless if the author intended to spam the front page or not. The files are blocking other recent mods from getting the spotlight they deserve as so many of the Hot Spot slots are filled by similar mods by the same author.

I'm not sure what kind of solution could be put in place to remedy the issue, but I just wanted bring this topic up for discussion among the staff and other Nexus users.

[Vaati88]

I think the easiest/best solution would be to limit the number of mods from a single author that can appear on hot files to either 1 or 2 at most. If the mod authors want all of their files to show up on hot files, they simply have to delay the release until after the hot files change. This allows multiple good mods by the same author to appear in hot files without actually blocking out other good mods.

[EpicCrab]

When this was raised in the Nexus mod authors discord, one of the suggested solutions (I believe from Pickysaurus) was that if an author had several files that would qualify for hot files, one would be randomly selected for display.

Another suggested solution is that authors would be limited to 2 or 3 files in the hot files at a time.

 

I don't think either solution is perfect, but they seem like good starting points.

[Arthmoor]

Reminds me of when this happened :P

 

https://i.imgur.com/tqziR0v.png

 

All 7 slots were mine :P

[AugustaCalidia]

@Arthmoor

 

All seven mods deserved those slots. They were and are splendid contributions to modding Skyrim SE.

[halgari]

This is also tied to donation points, right? Could that be part of what's going on here? Sure it's more work to make a fomod installer that allows users to select which parts of a mod compilation they want, but more smaller mods equates to more downloads overall for the "complete experience" meaning more donation points for the author.

[EpicCrab]

I don't know if I want to assume the decision is based on getting more Donation Points, but yeah, that is an effect of splitting up the files.

[Vaati88]

I don't think that splitting up the files is the inherent issue though. It's that they're all making it into Hot Files at the same time and blocking out other good mods that deserve to be there. 7 of what is essentially the same mod with a tiny difference should not be there at the same time.

[Shade088]

I also think that there should be a limit to how many hot files an author has at one time. As someone who just downloads mods, it's frustrating not being able to see a wider range of popular mods that just came out when most of them is from one author, regardless of how talented they are.

[Titansbane]

This is definitely an issue that needs to be raise. I release a mod at the same time that person uploaded several of the same Dragon voice mod, and my mod went completely unnoticed, hurting the mod indefinitely. Having very few downloads can be a big loss of motivation to continue working on the mod that I spent two months developing. So hopefully a solution can eventually be found.