Cool hope they do a decent job moderating the servers they run and limiting malware exposure. I also hope they’ve taken steps to prevent themselves being used as a host for malicious entities to distribute malware to third parties
The reason that they require an account is because if they did not require user side authentication then it would be trivial to upload obfuscated malware and then use Nexus as a host to distribute it. If someone uploads malware to a random S3 bucket or random VPS or random shared server and tries to use it as a malicious host, the owner and operator will notice a massive bandwidth spike Nexus won’t notice 30,000 downloads.
Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.
They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.
Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.
The issue with using torrents is longevity. You’d still want/need traditional storage backing it all. Don’t want some mod to become lost media because nobody is actively seeding it.
There are JS based torrent downloaders. That would work for the normies to get files, but you’d still have to find a way to convince people to host files on the backend. It’d probably take a full-on desktop client wrapper with an embedded torrent client but that’s a pretty hard sell for the average nerd if you’re upfront, and probably a harder sell if you’re dishonest about it.
Fuck Nexus Mods. You already need an account to download anything.
A free account.
It’s still an extra barrier. There’s zero point other than tracking what people do.
News flash running the servers isn’t free.
Yes they are tracking us. That’s how they pay to keep the servers running.
If your not paying you are the product.
If you’re paying they’re also tracking you.
But somehow eg. rdr2mods.com is free, and without account. Oh wonder.
Mods for one game vs basically every game
I could probably host the entirety of the mods on that site on my homelab, Nexus is exponentially larger and more complex
As it should be. Or are we pretending that centralization is suddenly good now?
It has always had its perks.
You mean cash for shareholders/owners? And a hassle to move to the next platform once it destroys itself?
Cool hope they do a decent job moderating the servers they run and limiting malware exposure. I also hope they’ve taken steps to prevent themselves being used as a host for malicious entities to distribute malware to third parties
Ah, like the sites of the 90s.
Yes I know.
Since we’re necrosing the thread
The reason that they require an account is because if they did not require user side authentication then it would be trivial to upload obfuscated malware and then use Nexus as a host to distribute it. If someone uploads malware to a random S3 bucket or random VPS or random shared server and tries to use it as a malicious host, the owner and operator will notice a massive bandwidth spike Nexus won’t notice 30,000 downloads.
We’re talking about for downloading not uploading.
It also tracks what you’ve downloaded to provide update notifications and encourage you to participate in the mod quality ratings system.
It’s not 100% without reason beyond tracking users.
And to limit scrapers.
Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.
They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn’t free, though I wonder how viable it’d be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.
Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.
The issue with using torrents is longevity. You’d still want/need traditional storage backing it all. Don’t want some mod to become lost media because nobody is actively seeding it.
There are JS based torrent downloaders. That would work for the normies to get files, but you’d still have to find a way to convince people to host files on the backend. It’d probably take a full-on desktop client wrapper with an embedded torrent client but that’s a pretty hard sell for the average nerd if you’re upfront, and probably a harder sell if you’re dishonest about it.
Wouldn’t the average nerd only need a good ol’ regular torrent client?
The slightly-more-than-average nerd could be incentivized through a specialized client that also acts as a mod manager (iirc Nexus Mods does this, minus the torrent protocol), and the bigger nerd would write themselves a Linux client without using glib nor GTK while evading bioluminescent three-letter org agents of specific ethnicity and sexual orientation.