I am annoyed by nexusmods...

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chtujo
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by chtujo »

BadLuckBurt
BadLuckBurt wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 5:18 am They actually state their reason for it when you try to download something without being logged in:

We require all users to login to a Nexus Mods account when downloading to prevent abuse of our systems, to provide additional security and so we can reliably reward the mod authors on Nexus Mods via our Donation Points system (which relies on us being able to record accurate download statistics).
To me this doesn't seem like a very good reason, why can't they just count downloads from registered users? You might point out that less people would get accounts, and you would be right. However they could just cap download speeds for non-registered users, and most people would just get an account.

I'm not demanding that Nexusmods do this, I'm just saying they seem very stingy, and, for me at least, this ruins my experience with the site. I'm not going to repeat everything in the first post, but I will repeat that on Moddb, I could download a 1 gig Skyrim mod, without an account, at around 4-5 MB/s, which AFAIK is limited by my internet. What I'm trying to say is that from my experience Nexusmods is not a great site.
BadLuckBurt wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 5:18 am Make an account, be happy!
I have 2 or 3 times over the years, and not been particularly happy. The site is mostly quite nice, not my style, but certainly not bad. The download speeds are capped pretty low, according to someone else on this thread 1 MB/s. As a sidenote, it was obviously my fault, but I did lose all but 1 of sed accounts.

Worse than all of this though, was trying to sign up, Nexusmods uses Google reCAPTCHA during the sign up process. This might sound fine, but on data cleared Firefox with a VPN, it's a challenge, on Tor Browser, it's a nightmare. The process went similar to this last time:

1: Take 15 seconds to realize you don't need to click anything on the "chose a package" screen
2: Enter username and email
3: Enter password twice
4: Answer registration question
5: Flip both tick boxes
6: Spend anywhere between 10 to over 60 seconds trying to do the captcha
a: "could not connect to recaptcha server"
1: refresh page, repeat steps 3, 5, and 6
b: reCAPTCHA actually works continue to step 8
7: Click create account button
a: "captcha expired" (if you did the captcha too early, before other forms)
1: refresh page, repeat steps 3, 5, and 6
b: some other captcha error message
1: refresh page, repeat steps 3, 5, and 6
c: wow, it actually worked
8: Download mod


This whole process can take over 10 minutes sometimes, and when I just want to download a small mod, it's excruciating.

Meanwhile on Moddb, all I have to do is go to the mod page, click the files tab and select a file, and without an account I can download Enderal, a 7.8 Gigabyte mod, no account required. This whole process takes about 1 minute, and the mod also downloads ~5x faster for me.

Just to be very clear about what I'm arguing: I don't like Nexusmods, my experience with the site, particularly the signup process, have not been fun. You can use it, and enjoy it, but for at least some users, it can be a huge pain. Also their download requirements, and more so download speeds are relatively stingy (compared to Moddb).

That's my perspective at least!




Skipper
Skipper wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 5:49 am By the way, I made a super simple mod for skyrim (for myself) and uploaded it to nexus, and as soon as 1000 people downloaded it, I was considered as "true mod author" and now nexus disabled ads for me, and doubled my bandwith (from 1 to 2 megabytes per second), which is a big deal.
2 MB/s is still far from what I can get on Moddb, without an account. I don't see why they can't be more generous from the get-go. :)




King of Worms
King of Worms wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 9:39 am I dont think that stating the reasons why I prefer to share my mods on nexus rather than on the DFU forums is aggressive. Is having a different opinion and explaining the reasoning behind that from the creators point of view considered aggressive nowadays?
It came off pretty passive aggressive to me, particularly;
King of Worms wrote: Im sorry you have a problem setting up a free account to download stuff for free
and
King of Worms wrote: Sleep well ;)
Either way, in response to:
King of Worms wrote: And one think to consider, some ppl spend 1000s of hours creating the mods for free, and you you feel bothered spending 20seconds to set a free account to download them?
Not a particularly great counter argument (to what I was trying to say at least, it might have come across wrong). As I detailed in my response to BadLuckBurt, for me the signup process takes quite a while longer than 20 seconds.

Using your same argument (if it works for you?):

And one think to consider, you've spent 1000s of hours creating DREAM for free, and you you feel bothered spending 5 minutes to set a free account to upload them to another service?

Sleep well ;)


[Copied from above]
Just to be very clear about what I'm arguing: I don't like Nexusmods, my experience with the site, particularly the signup process, have not been fun. You can use it, and enjoy it, but for at least some users, it can be a huge pain. Also their download requirements, and more so download speeds are relatively stingy (compared to Moddb).

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BadLuckBurt
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by BadLuckBurt »

Sorry, I butchered the quotes a bit or it would've ballooned into a massive repost.
CHAPPJO wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:29 am To me this doesn't seem like a very good reason, why can't they just count downloads from registered users? You might point out that less people would get accounts, and you would be right. However they could just cap download speeds for non-registered users, and most people would just get an account.

I'm not demanding that Nexusmods do this, I'm just saying they seem very stingy, and, for me at least, this ruins my experience with the site. I'm not going to repeat everything in the first post, but I will repeat that on Moddb, I could download a 1 gig Skyrim mod, without an account, at around 4-5 MB/s, which AFAIK is limited by my internet. What I'm trying to say is that from my experience Nexusmods is not a great site.
The downloads are tied into back-end systems like the one Skipper mentioned, his mod hit 1000 downloads and he's rewarded with increased UPLOAD speed because I don't think the jump from 1MB/s to 2MB/s is about his download speed, they just allow him to upload his creations faster. The fairest implementation of systems like these comes from having an accurate download count amongst other metrics. In order to get that accurate count, they monitor downloads per account.

ModDB is very basic compared to Nexus Mods, it works fine for what it is, I'm not denying that but creators of said mods definitely can do more through Nexus. All I do on the Nexus is download mods and if I feel like it, leave feedback. I don't even use other features, never visited the Nexus forums etc. but I understand why others do and why it has value for them.
CHAPPJO wrote: Mon Oct 14, 2019 10:29 am The download speeds are capped pretty low, according to someone else on this thread 1 MB/s. As a sidenote, it was obviously my fault, but I did lose all but 1 of sed accounts.

-snip - that sign up does sound frustrating

This whole process can take over 10 minutes sometimes, and when I just want to download a small mod, it's excruciating.

Meanwhile on Moddb, all I have to do is go to the mod page, click the files tab and select a file, and without an account I can download Enderal, a 7.8 Gigabyte mod, no account required. This whole process takes about 1 minute, and the mod also downloads ~5x faster for me.
I'm not going to get into download speeds too much, I've downloaded MP3 albums on dial-up back in the day so I'm not bothered if something takes a few minutes longer these days.

The claim that it downloads 5 times faster seems false to me but the last time I downloaded large mods from Nexus was about 2 years ago. They probably have some cap set, any site dealing with that many downloads does that.

As far as the sign-up goes, I understand your frustration, reCaptcha sucks balls, especially version 2. That it doesn't work well on Tor Browser does not surprise me but if that's down to reCaptcha, blame Google, not Nexus. VPN shouldn't be as bad depending on what kind of VPN we're talking about. I've been unable to open certain work-related sites on corporate VPNs because apparently not mangling SSL certificates is hard for some system / network admins.

Lastly, King of Worms' remarks really aren't passive aggressive, he was just poking sarcastic fun at something that in his eyes seems easy to fix. At that point nobody knew about the signup troubles. 99% of the people that try to register probably have no issue at all. Using Tor and/or VPN are special cases.

I'll just leave it at this, I'll add that I almost lost my Nexus account because I hadn't logged in for over 6 months :D and had to grab one of the DFU mods from there.
DFU on UESP: https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=T ... fall_Unity
DFU Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity
My github repositories with mostly DFU related stuff: https://github.com/BadLuckBurt

.

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King of Worms
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by King of Worms »

Everything was said already, have fun whining ;)

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Corsair
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by Corsair »

I don't mind the sign up, because it also has the added bonus of remembering what mods you downloaded, reminding you when you favorite mod author released a new mod, what mod's been updated - all done automatically. And when you're dealing with Morrowind levels of mod content, this is a blessing. DFU ain't there yet, but one day they will be, and it'll be great to have an interface that says X, Y, and Z mods have an update available.

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Seferoth
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by Seferoth »

I love Nexus, such a wonderful site. Have been member for many years now, met great people and some awful people there too. I really don't understand how it's a problem to make an account there.

Jeoshua
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by Jeoshua »

As a mod author on The Nexus, I can tell you that you're not being asked to sign up for a Nexus account because it makes your life easier, it's because publishing on Nexus makes OUR life easier. You have to sign up for an account once. However big an inconvenience that may be for you, we aren't considering that a huge amount of effort to spend compared to how much effort we save by using their service. In return for using Nexus, we get free promotion, free storage, rankings and even a small hand out in the the form of points we can spent on the site itself. We make mods for free. The site is free for you to use. If that's a problem for you, you need to examine what you think you somehow owed by us to go out of our way to make your life easier... For free.

chtujo
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by chtujo »

Jeoshua wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2019 2:29 am As a mod author on The Nexus, I can tell you that you're not being asked to sign up for a Nexus account because it makes your life easier, it's because publishing on Nexus makes OUR life easier. You have to sign up for an account once. However big an inconvenience that may be for you, we aren't considering that a huge amount of effort to spend compared to how much effort we save by using their service. In return for using Nexus, we get free promotion, free storage, rankings and even a small hand out in the the form of points we can spent on the site itself. We make mods for free. The site is free for you to use. If that's a problem for you, you need to examine what you think you somehow owed by us to go out of our way to make your life easier... For free.
It's not worth going through the whole argument again. In short, what I was asking for was for people to also upload their mods to an alternate service like moddb, which doesn't limit downloads to 1 MB/s, and alows you to download files without signing up. I don't like signing up to Nexus Mods because they user ReCaptcha, which is a huge pain to get through on just about anything non-Google.

Jeoshua
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by Jeoshua »

If I'm already using Nexus, I'm personally not going to provide a secondary download site for those people who can't or won't use the one I've already provided. Multiple distribution mirrors which I personally have to manage is too much of an ask for something I am not getting paid for, especially now that Nexus actually does have a Donation system where I can theoretically get paid something for my hard work.

I read your post about how your personal set up makes using Nexus a chore. That's mainly because of your own actions and desire to use the internet completely anonymously, ultimately borne out of distrust for anyone wanting to keep track of you for any reason. And while going to some random site online without protection is a bad idea, it is ultimately your lack of trust in a site that others have vouched for and have greatly benefited from the use of which has caused you these problems. If you can't step outside of your hyper privacy shield for long enough to prove you're not a robot, I'm not going to spend extra time and energy on maintaining a mirror to enable that paranoia.

People call mod authors mean. We're just tired of being asked to do extra work for free. If you were asking for mods to be distributed on Github, that's a different story. That gives benefit and saves me time. But ModDB? Come on.

I have mods on Nexus that I uploaded in 2012 and still keep updated. Nexus advertises those mods for me. They even pay me money. It's only enough for a cup of coffee every now and then, but it's a damned sight more than any user ever paid me for my labor. And they ask nothing from me, unlike my users. It makes my life easier. If it weren't for that, my work in those games would be lost forever.

chtujo
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by chtujo »

Jeoshua wrote: Mon Dec 16, 2019 4:07 am If I'm already using Nexus, I'm personally not going to provide a secondary download site for those people who can't or won't use the one I've already provided. Multiple distribution mirrors which I personally have to manage is too much of an ask for something I am not getting paid for, especially now that Nexus actually does have a Donation system where I can theoretically get paid something for my hard work.

I read your post about how your personal set up makes using Nexus a chore. That's mainly because of your own actions and desire to use the internet completely anonymously, ultimately borne out of distrust for anyone wanting to keep track of you for any reason. And while going to some random site online without protection is a bad idea, it is ultimately your lack of trust in a site that others have vouched for and have greatly benefited from the use of which has caused you these problems. If you can't step outside of your hyper privacy shield for long enough to prove you're not a robot, I'm not going to spend extra time and energy on maintaining a mirror to enable that paranoia.

People call mod authors mean. We're just tired of being asked to do extra work for free. If you were asking for mods to be distributed on Github, that's a different story. That gives benefit and saves me time. But ModDB? Come on.

I have mods on Nexus that I uploaded in 2012 and still keep updated. Nexus advertises those mods for me. They even pay me money. It's only enough for a cup of coffee every now and then, but it's a damned sight more than any user ever paid me for my labor. And they ask nothing from me, unlike my users. It makes my life easier. If it weren't for that, my work in those games would be lost forever.
I don't mind trusting Nexus mods, but I do mind trusting Google, who own Re-Captcha. I also didn't ask for Moddb specifically, I asked for an alternative that doesn't require logging in, Github would work just as well, and I would be very appreciative if you, and possibly others, would upload your mods there as an alternative download.

Either way I don't see this argument being resolved anytime soon, so if possible it would be good to stop around here.

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King of Worms
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Re: I am annoyed by nexusmods...

Post by King of Worms »

Yes stoping is really good idea. If u want mods elswhere, than make em and publish them there

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