I agree with you of these download speed like 250-300 Kb there is on Nexus, but sometimes I've notice that the download speed can be dropped a little depending of the traffic there is on Nexus at that time when you're downloading a mod.

You're right about that this is not a place to discuss such issue.

I haven't had any download problems there since the last attack but sounds like I missed it being down this time. I have premium membership there and the downloads are still slower compared to PES. I don't think that is intentional. Think it's just that PES and FilePlanet probably have a lot more money.

Regarding EuroMorrowind, I'm 99% certain that the mods from there were not saved. There was an effort to get people to re-upload, but there were a ton of uncontactable authors.

When the next site went down, whose name I can't now recall, that was the one Dark_0ne mostly saved, IIRC. This was all a long time ago, though.

And yes, mod authors need to have mirrors. After EuroMorrowind, the Morrowind mod community got pretty good about this, but the Oblivion community, from what I have seen, has become way too dependent on TES Nexus. And I'm speaking as someone with a lifetime subscription to TES Nexus, which I have never once regretted.

My memory is almost as bad as yours in regards to what site the MW community lost so soon after EuroMorrowind, but it certainly was the major Morrowind site as far as the number of mods held was concerned. Also I do remember there was a mad scramble by the good people at Elric Melnibone to salvage as many of the lost mods as possible.
I think that Fliggerty was also involved and around 85/90% were eventually recovered.
But as has been said we really need to mirror mods to other sites like TESAlliance, PES and ElricM (who's site has always been a great supporter of TES) in case the unthinkable should ever happen again.

Does Gamer's Roam ring a bell. :whistling:

I know some people who actually download every mod there was on that site before it went down. A lot of these mods are now hosted on Morrowind Modding History, well most of them are, and some of those mods there hasn't be around elsewhere for years IIRC except on MMH.

I agree with DragoonWraith's opinion about the Oblivion community which has become too dependent on Nexus, because I don't know of any site who has that kind of vast numbers of mods hosted on a single site elsewhere.
Anyone can image what effect that could have if Nexus was abandoned or closed.

You must have been around the TES scene for longer than just one year.
Would you be better know under another pseudo-name in a past life?

Yes I was known under a different name before but that's history now, because my current account is my second here since I abandoned the first one almost a year ago. I'm a member on both Emma's TES forum and Great House Fliggerty, but also a staff member on Morrowind Modding History.

I suppose it was Gamer's Roam then. :wink_smile:

Figures. :thumbsup:

TESSourge? (perhaps) Rotten memory

If its down, that means some 20 year old acted like a10 year old brat did not like being kick out and shut down the site.

Sadly enough, he's apparently over 30.

You mean TES Source? The site that was the precursor to Nexus?

Also, yes, mirroring would be great. It's too bad PES makes that a massive pain in the ass with their insanely low file size limits. 25MB no longer cuts it for many things. ModDB.com was once a good place to use as a mirror but they've turned their download management over to GameFront (filefront - ICK) and they're practically useless now.

I have for years tried to set an example of uploading mods to multiple locations and using file mirror sites as well. Even created a http://wiki.tesnexus.com/index.php/List_of_online_hosting_sites to describe the free resources available to everyone.

It is not an issue of how great a site is, its about putting all your eggs in a single basket and how that is never a good idea. But many people just don't care or think the mod is worth the effort and figure if the site goes away, so will the mod.

I cannot speak about the variance in download speeds since I don't watch it that closely. It comes down fast and I simply don't hang around to watch. I typically spend most of my downloading time prepping the last archive I downloaded by adjusting the file structure, readme details such as adding a readme if one does not exist and recording key details such as date it was modified, version number, author, download URL and permission info. That keeps me fairly busy doing that more than waiting on downloads to finish downloading.

EDIT: TESSource.net was/is TESNexus. When Dark0ne broke ties with his partner, he retained the forum data and the mod database but had to re-write all the code which is now TESNexus. We also lost all images attached to the mods and with help from the community, much of the old mod images have been restored.

Also, PES does have a 25MB file cap but that is ONLY with the automated upload page. They have an FTP site you can upload larger files to and then send an email to them letting them know which file you uploaded and to which mod page it should be attached to. That is what I did with Lost Paladins of the Divines way back in the day and the process is still the same today.

LHammonds

I love when I see mirrors, because I played a game in the past that lost a major mod site rather suddenly, and many great mods were lost. Another site tried to collect them all from volunteers who uploaded them, but there was often missing documentation, etc. Many of the modders had given permission to share the mods, but they could not be contacted anymore to replace the documentation, modder's resource files, etc. It was a big mess, and very sad.

I do wish people didn't mirror on megaupload. I made the mistake of clicking once, and eeeek. I have good security, but that site is not a safe mirror. It put my security to the test the second it loaded.

Nexus downloads are fast enough. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. That and TESAlliance are my two mod download sites for Oblivion. I don't really like PES and FilePlanet as much, but it's still reassuring when people upload to multiple stable locations.

That's exactly what Morrowind Modding History is all about to collect mods from authors and others who're willing to contribute them to MMH. If you want to see more site mirrors for a mod you should try http://yacoby.silgrad.com/MW/index.htm http://search.yacoby.net/. :tes:

Since Nexus doesn't host many mods for Morrowind these days I suppose that Nexus is becoming a dominating mod site for Oblivion. Are am I wrong?

I remember Gamer's Roam but I can't recall if that's the same as the site I was thinking of... maybe it was...

Anyway, yes, TES Nexus has become dominant in ways that I don't think even EuroMorrowind has ever been. On the one hand, Dark_0ne has been an exceptionally excellent administrator and it seems apparent that TES Nexus is actually a profitable venture that is well-run and serious, which means it's quite stable (this has always been the advantage that PES had, in that IGN/Gamespy is not going anywhere any time soon). But still, it is dangerous; I don't expect any problems from TES Nexus but it's still bad habit.

That's all well and good, but you've got it easy considering you only have NifSE to worry about

Well, even with only NifSe (and ARES too, I might add), he's had a million hard-drive crashes thanks to Seagate! :brokencomputer:

Fair and true enough; I was not directly criticizing any modder. I mean, I don't play anymore — I am not going to be unduly affected if the worst happens. Just saying, it's a very serious risk that this community is running at this point. I would point out that both ARES and NifSE are mirrored on Google Code, which I think is a pretty safe place.

EDIT: Swordsage'd by anithinks — ahahaha, also true! Blargh, that has been obnoxious. My father got me a terabyte external harddrive for my birthday for exactly that reason.

The current harddrive count is five failed, on the sixth now. Also, had a RAM stick get corrupted and a video card fry (both on warranty) for no apparent reason just in this year.

Heh, I wasn't suggesting that you were. For what its worth, I completely agree with your point.

The main reason Nexus is where it is in terms of dominance is convenience. Yes, I know PES will allow you to upload to FTP for >25MB files. That's not very convenient though. Not knocking APY, but there were times where I was doing updates and it would be a week or longer before stuff would get posted there. If they raised the limit to 100MB then most of the problem with uploading there would be gone.

Even before ModDB.com got absorbed into the Gamefront family, they were hugely inconvenient because there's no interface to delete an unwanted file. Once up, it's up, unless you bug the admins to remove it.

Right now TESA is the only other mainstream modding site that has the kind of autonomous support that's as convenient as Nexus. Unless I'm missing something that's out there in one of the other lesser known areas.

Also since people asked, Nexus appears to have a ceiling cap on download speeds of 500K/s for non-premium users. That's pretty good in the grand scheme of things.

The Nexus and TESAlliance seem the best maintained to me. I could be misjudging, but I feel that if a mod had rips of someone else's work, and the original modder reported it, it would vanish very quickly from both those sites, and maybe I am wrong, but I am not sure the others are as good at curating collections. Providing downloads they are good at but I don't even know the names of any admins at those places. I'm sure they are well staffed, but those sites kind of lack a visible human presence. They are kind of like fast food drive-ins to me. I do think they are stable, so they make good mirrors unless, as Arthmoor points out, you wanted to delete your mod and it was hard to get that done. Maybe I should say they are good mirrors for downloaders but maybe not as good for uploaders, which really matters more. Modders really need to be able to remove old versions, update files, etc. One of you guys correct me if I am wrong, but I would imagine it's easier to provide support on Nexus, TSA and here than through PES or FilePlanet also.

My Oblivion nightmare would be if the owner of the Nexus ever accepted some large buyout offer. I don't think he would do that but if he hasn't had good offers already, I'd be surprised if he doesn't get some tempting ones sooner or later.

When I said deleting files, I was referring to individual downloads associated with the mod entry. Like with All Natural, there's a hotfix we no longer need but I can't get rid of it at ModDB.com because there's no facility available for deleting files. They don't have a method for deleting the entire mod either, but that's beside the point

Nexus and TESA are the only two places I've seen with user facing full delete options for the entire mod. Both sites have excellent file management, but for some reason TESA is vastly underutilized.

elderscrolls.filefront.com is a maintenance nightmare because you can't update an entry once it's made, and the admins there don't respond to deletion requests unless you lie and claim there's a copyright issue. The rest of the filefront family of sites is such a mess I wouldn't bother using any of them. Stuff is scattered everywhere and there's things up on that place that has been reported as stolen that they simply ignore you on.

I mirror my own stuff off of my blog, but that's hardly helpful to other people. It's better than nothing though for failsafe purposes.

The ones I remember are Morrowind Files, EuroMorrowind and Gamer's Roam. Can't think of any others. Morrowind Files was massive and the go-to place for Morrowind mods around 2001 - 2002 as far as I can recall. Bethesda helped them with their hosting, I think they gave them the server for their site. One day the admin just up and quit never to return again and no one had proper admin access to the site. The files were still downloadable for months afterwards while the site died a horribly slow death to spammers and hackers (PHPNuke was notoriously easy to hack), which gave the next site, which I think was EuroMorrowind, the opportunity to get the ball rolling quickly with lots of mods straight off the bat. That's how I remember it anyway. It was almost 9 years ago!

The Nexus is in the process of a redesign. Dreading the community feedback as anything I do now is met with massive negativity and cynicism, often without purpose or reason other than it being a change. Woe is me, etc..

It is amazing how much people hate and can't handle change until they eventually realize it is for the better. Then they wouldn't want it to go back to how it was before, for anything.

I for one am really looking forward to the new Nexus site design. The site already has a very user friendly design, so I imagine I will like the new version just as much or more.

I'm not really sure why TESA isn't more popular, except that I did have to try 3 times to register there. It told me that the registration failed, every time. Weirdly enough, later I got a mail saying I was registered, and by then I had no idea which one had gone through, so I had to guess. I think it was probably an issue with IE9, but I don't really know what went wrong, so I wouldn't be able to file a very useful bug report. :/ TESA has incredibly lucid modding tutorials.