I suppose the blowback from modders was big enough for Nexus to actually make an announcement about this policy change.
https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14538

Again, it's very dishonest and tries to portray modders, the people who supply them with 100% of their real content, as trying to hold them back or whatever. So many lies, half-truths and strawmen in that statement. Well, if anybody are interested, you can give it a read.

The little light in the tunnel is that they are giving modders the option to delete their files. But only if they delete every single last bit. All or nothing. Very gracious of them :rolleyes:

Meanwhile, people have started to move over to GitHub and probably other places. I know many big Witcher 3 modders either have done so, are in the process of doing it, or are on the fence. I don't know what is happening in the Skyrim community, but I do know that some of them were very upset, based on previous threads on reddit (as mentioned, Nexus basically deleted everything to try to keep the change hidden).

Unfortunately there isn't really a good alternative to NexusMods right now, but maybe it will change. Not the first modding site to shoot themselves in the foot and consequently in practice disappear.

I posted this in a couple Discord servers. Admittedly I'm not 100% sure if everything is correct, but hopefully not too far off target. I do have a little experience with these licences off the back of being active on some wikis, but maybe some of you can clear things up?

As mentioned above, many of them are upset about losing control over the work they have carried out themselves, and then that Nexus will try to profit off of it via a paywalled/premium 'service', where these modpacks (which they call collections) will be hosted, or locked in. That is why I looked into this from the perspective of the mods not going back to nexus and then going into this paywall scheme.

------------------------

In case [modders] intend to use this opportunity to delete all files from nexus and move them over to e.g. Github: A license that may be fitting is the NonCommercial (NC) one: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

It includes these "you are free to"
* Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
* Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

Which is normally great, but perhaps dodgy here if people want to prevent people copying it back to Nexus. However, this applies "under the following terms":
* Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
* NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

NC would then be crucial, if my interpretation of this is correct. By going to the legal section (the above is from the human-readable part) we find something else that may be crucial: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode

Under Section 8 - Interpretation
a. For the avoidance of doubt, this Public License does not, and shall not be interpreted to, reduce, limit, restrict, or impose conditions on any use of the Licensed Material that could lawfully be made without permission under this Public License.
c. No term or condition of this Public License will be waived and no failure to comply consented to unless expressly agreed to by the Licensor.

Admittedly I'm not 100% sure, but I think that combined this means that mods with this license cannot be copied back to Nexus by some random, and then put into modpacks/collections, which are behind paywalls/premium. Because that touches on "reduce, limit, restrict", which is not allowed.

Last edited by Pangaea on 1 Jul 2021 at 8:23 pm UTC

Kinda scummy to drop it on them like that.
If they were warned ahead it would have been much better.
I understand the site needs money to operate, but screwing over creators like this can mean that a lot o them won't come back.

Also , if they monetize them , they have to support them , no ? How do they do that without the author's support ?

Quoting: razing32Also , if they monetize them , they have to support them , no ? How do they do that without the author's support ?

If I understand things right, there is a slight trickle down already - something they call Donation Points. Even for big mods (many downloads), the sum is pretty tiny, but at least it's something. The big ones can buy a chocolate a month or something. Woot.

A bird may (or may not) have been in contact with Electronic Frontier Foundation. Will they help or advise? Only birds will know.

Thought this meme was rather on-point:



I honestly hope a whole pack of modders ditch the site and move elsewhere. It's a tough choice of course, because they don't want to hurt the end users, and lose the visibility the platform offers, but I simply feel that there has to be some real consequences for doing something as scummy as this, and with a swoop essentially steal millions of mods that people have worked millions of hours on, and offered to the world for free.

I also really wonder what Nexus will throw at us after the 30 day period has passed, when modders can no longer delete their mods. It's "all or nothing" now, which is another scummy move by Nexus, but at least it's possible to remove them. In a month it won't be. If I had mods there, I'd grab that opportunity with both hands and move them to GitHub or elsewhere. It's always possible to move them back to Nexus later.

Though one concern I've heard, since Nexus have shown to have no scruples anyway, is what happens if some random dude then uploads the mod to Nexus, and the real creators can't show it as proof, because the original has been deleted.

Oh, and unsurprisingly, that news thread was locked down fairly fast. It was open for two days, and got well over 2000 comments. Nexus have since deleted some of them, though I naturally can't know what for, or what those posts contained (but we can make some good guesses based on what else they delete and lock).

Quite disappointed to see this kind of behaviour from NexusMods. I thought they would try better to support their creators. These websites just don't seem to realise, that if you treat the people who create the actual content for your website like garbage, they will just go elsewhere.

Good find Pangaea!

A week back I contacted Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) [[link](https://www.eff.org/)] about the NexusMods situation. They just replied. Seems like it's grown quiet about the theft lately, but if any modders want to look deeper into this case, and are seeking legal advice, please contact EFF directly. You should use the [email protected] address.

[...]if you know of any individual modders who are seeking legal advice here please have them reach out to us directly.

I don't know what kind of support they can offer, or if they'd be willing to take on the case in an official capacity, but it seems like a good first step. Presumably they can tell a bit more about whether modders would have a leg to stand on legally.

More information here:
https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance

Perhaps it's unlikely any modders will frequent this site and see this, and then contact EFF, but just in case, I wanted to reach out where I could.

Last edited by Pangaea on 16 Jul 2021 at 8:59 pm UTC

This pisses me off, as I got their lifetime account a few years back. Then again they have shit Linux support for anything even though vortex is open source...

I usually prefer games these days to use Steam Workshop for mods, but then I can see why a developer / modder wouldn't want to, as then they're pretty much stuck on Steam.

Quoting: slaapliedjeThis pisses me off, as I got their lifetime account a few years back. .

Sorry to break this but your lifetime thing appears to be dead.
https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14543

They couldn't even bother waiting until the deletion period was out, which is good I suppose. Showing their middle finger yet again. With both hands. The way they lay it out as well is so incredibly dishonest. Feels like I'm getting stomach acid in my mouth just reading it. So much greed, so little respect and appreciation for the people who have supplied them with their life and income. I hope EVERYBODY remove their mods from that toxic site. They don't deserve us.

Quoting: Pangaea

Quoting: slaapliedjeThis pisses me off, as I got their lifetime account a few years back. .

Sorry to break this but your lifetime thing appears to be dead.
https://www.nexusmods.com/news/14543

They couldn't even bother waiting until the deletion period was out, which is good I suppose. Showing their middle finger yet again. With both hands. The way they lay it out as well is so incredibly dishonest. Feels like I'm getting stomach acid in my mouth just reading it. So much greed, so little respect and appreciation for the people who have supplied them with their life and income. I hope EVERYBODY remove their mods from that toxic site. They don't deserve us.

Well fuck them then. It's a good thing I tend to stay away from mods, though the only game that I usually mod the hell out of is the Elder Scrolls ones, which have started to be hosted on Steam anyhow.

Quoting: GuestWell, the writing was on the wall for quite some time now. As much as mods are "grey" zone anyway, even the creators and the audience should've known things like this are bound to happen. It would be interesting to see if these large communities could create their own platforms, but it's highly unlikely as most modders don't give damn about free/libre content.

I know for a fact that something is in the works. If it becomes a success is another question, and if people will embrace it, but it seems like a good solution that is more based on git. Unfortunately it seems to be based on the premise of having a github account, which is going to be a big stumbling block for getting widescale use. But it's a nice option for the time being, and looks promising.

Hopefully modders flee from Nexus. They deserve better respect for their work than outright theft, abuse and tall, elaborate paywalls.

Maybe it's time for us to create an open-source, and owned by the community, modding platform/website to prevent things like this in the future.

Quoting: GuestTbh i rather have a paywall but then have the content be free to use and copy, maybe with some credit clause or reasonable modification clause, it would fit the spirit a lot better and it could even prevent copycats souring the original authors mood. (basically fitting it closely to the content alternative of free software with mandatory credits as those seem to be a great source of pride/motivation for lots of modders.) If they have something like a git site in mind, that might be along these lines anyway.

This is still very much an "in progress" kinda thing, so expect improvements, but it's one of the solutions being worked on. Hopefully there are others too, though I'm not aware of them myself.

https://aelto.github.io/modspot/browse/

There is a [realm concept](https://aelto.github.io/modspot/realm/create/) too, which from what I understood it is a way to hook into other non-Git places, like a forum listing, an own domain, Nexus, moddb, etc. Don't think Modspot would list the individual mods automatically, but if there is a realm file (like a quasi-mod) in the middle that talks to the API, then it should be possible. So in theory at least, this solution under development could show all mods from 10 different modding sites or whatever, and then link to the mod's original source, whether that be github, nexus, moddb or gameXmods.com and so on. It looks promising to me.

For best features, the developer says you need to log in with a Github account, which isn't ideal in my view, but on the other hand we require a nexus account just to download mods from those crooks, so in that sense this is already better.

Maybe somebody are working on a more "commercial" host-type alternative too, I don't know. I've heard some modders have gone to discord channels or private patrons too (but with free access/not paywalled), but naturally those aren't very easy to find. So a more accessible solution like Modspot could be a good solution. Time will tell I suppose :smile:

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Pangaea

Quoting: GuestTbh i rather have a paywall but then have the content be free to use and copy, maybe with some credit clause or reasonable modification clause, it would fit the spirit a lot better and it could even prevent copycats souring the original authors mood. (basically fitting it closely to the content alternative of free software with mandatory credits as those seem to be a great source of pride/motivation for lots of modders.) If they have something like a git site in mind, that might be along these lines anyway.

This is still very much an "in progress" kinda thing, so expect improvements, but it's one of the solutions being worked on. Hopefully there are others too, though I'm not aware of them myself.

https://aelto.github.io/modspot/browse/

There is a [realm concept](https://aelto.github.io/modspot/realm/create/) too, which from what I understood it is a way to hook into other non-Git places, like a forum listing, an own domain, Nexus, moddb, etc. Don't think Modspot would list the individual mods automatically, but if there is a realm file (like a quasi-mod) in the middle that talks to the API, then it should be possible. So in theory at least, this solution under development could show all mods from 10 different modding sites or whatever, and then link to the mod's original source, whether that be github, nexus, moddb or gameXmods.com and so on. It looks promising to me.

For best features, the developer says you need to log in with a Github account, which isn't ideal in my view, but on the other hand we require a nexus account just to download mods from those crooks, so in that sense this is already better.

Maybe somebody are working on a more "commercial" host-type alternative too, I don't know. I've heard some modders have gone to discord channels or private patrons too (but with free access/not paywalled), but naturally those aren't very easy to find. So a more accessible solution like Modspot could be a good solution. Time will tell I suppose :smile:

You seem like you follow this scene a lot more closely than i do, so i guess it's worth a try: are you aware of a well put together mod pack for skyrim that is ready for install without the crap mod managers/windows only tools?

For SkyrimVR too :)

Quoting: GuestYou seem like you follow this scene a lot more closely than i do, so i guess it's worth a try: are you aware of a well put together mod pack for skyrim that is ready for install without the crap mod managers/windows only tools?

Sorry for the late reply, but sadly I don't have a good overview of mods for Skyrim. I have never played it :o