NexusMods.com hacked

Yet again it appears Nexus Mods has been hacked. Hundreds of thousands of passwords have been disclosed to the hackers and the owner Robin Scott (Dark0ne) continues to carelessly dismiss the privacy concerns highlighted by the community. The sad fact is Dark0ne was well aware of this potential security breach way back in August 2015 but has only recently disclosed the fact.

The breach appears to only affect user registrations up to mid-2013, but Nexus Mods is recommending that all users reset passwords. The hack also seems to have led to changes to modifications for certain games.

Nexus Mods representative DarkOne explained in a statement that

“it’s too ambiguous to draw any concrete conclusion”, but there is potential there has been a database breach. Thankfully “it's relatively safe to assume that whoever made this dump no longer has access to our database. Why? Because if they did, they'd have released a much more up-to-date dump of our member database.”

You should be safe if you registered after July 22nd 2013, but if not the potential hack may have compromised your user ID, username, and email address. Passwords are encrypted, but they could be broken into with time. If you’re a premium subscriber there’s no concerns about payment details since that side is handled completely by PayPal.

Meanwhile the highly sensitive details of each visitor are publically available via the extreme tracking website. Dark0ne is adamant this does not breach a visitors privacy and the sheer disregard for the visitors of his website is unbelievable.

http://extremetracking.com/open?login=skyrim

Rise of the Clones

When you make enough enemies there are bound to be consequences and Dark0ne has a lot of them. A sinister website called donaspito has emerged over the last few weeks. It's a direct copy of the nexusmods website. It's hard to trace the owner and a whois search does not reveal much. Is it a possible counterfit Chinese clone or an attempt by dark0ne to make more money.

Several users pointed out that certain mods on nexusmods are being put behind a paywall such as SkyUI. The modder uploads a sort of a demo of the mod in particular and if the downloader likes it they pay a fixed fee to get the full modification. If this is the case then the duplicate website makes a lot of sense since Dark0ne can avoid taking the blame. Dark0ne is slowly but surely introducing a paywall into the mod scene under the radar. Summer is approaching and Dark0ne needs his usual lavish holiday somewhere exotic. It's a very worrying time for creative modders.

I wouldn't recommend logging into donaspito until more information has been revealed.

http://www.donaspito.com

Premium Membership price hike

For years the NexusMods site has funded itself through a premium membership system where members can choose to pay for additional privileges.

These include;

• No Adverts
• Faster Downloading speeds
• A silly little logo on your profile

Recently the prices have been increased, supposedly this is in accordance with the rise in inflation. After speaking to various members they insist that premium membership is a complete waste of money. The adverts can be easily blocked using the Firefox/Chrome adblock addon. If you're patient the extra downloading speed is completely pointless.

The nexusmods website has been plagued with problem after problem and most of the time the site is completely inaccessible due to the dreaded 502 error.

Many suspect that the premium membership system is just a scam to fund Robin Scotts insatiable greedy appetite. Personally I don't think it will be long before members are required to use the nexus mod manager to download files from the site. It's a perfect medium to track what gamers are playing and to force them to view adverts.

It's sad to see a website creating a two tier system where there is such a disparity between rich and poor. Meanwhile the premium members will happily continue to pay and be misled.

Everyone should be treated equally.

Don’t you hate it when you pay for something and then the next day it goes on sale? Don’t you equally hate it when you’re thinking about buying something but continue to put it off and then the price goes up? That’s why I’m here to give you a friendly heads-up that from October we’re going to be raising our Premium Membership prices in-line with, drum-roll please, inflation. Fact is money isn’t worth as much as it used to be (does that make sense?) and money is exactly what we need right now.

We launched our Premium Membership back in 2006 and since then it’s become an extremely important stream of revenue for the Nexus. Without it this network simply wouldn’t exist. We’ve spent over £120,000 ($187,000) in the past few months on trying to sort out the stability of the network for the future. We’re still not done and we’ll continue to invest in the infrastructure until we’ve got it right. It’s been an expensive year as we’re currently running (and paying for) our new system in parallel with our old one until the new one is ready, which means we’re essentially paying double right now. If you ever wondered what your Premium Membership goes towards, that’s what it goes towards. And the 4 dedicated programmers working on the site. And the 37 servers we have running the network (that number goes up every time I write about this sort of stuff!). And the 3 GBits of bandwidth we use every second. And so on.

From the start of October our prices for Premium Membership will be rising as follows:

Life time of Supporter membership (not the same as Premium). Originally £1. Now £1.29. 1 month of Premium Membership. Originally £2.49. Now £2.99. 3 months of Premium Membership. Originally £6.99. Now £8.49. 6 months of Premium Membership. Originally £11.99. Now £14.49. 12 months of Premium Membership. Originally £19.99. Now £24.49. Life time of Premium Membership. Originally £39.99. Now £49.99. Remember Premium Membership at any level gives you an ad free experience on any and all Nexus sites, current or future (yet to be made sites), for life irrespective of whether you buy 1 month or a lifetime. You also get unrestricted download speeds on all the servers and multi-threading enabled file downloads to a maximum of 4 threads per file.

People hate NexusMods

A short video explaining why the NexusMods website is taking so long to load lately. It's clear that the members of staff at NexusMods have upset a lot of individuals. The site has been under a sustained DDoS attack for the last few weeks. When you insist on banning people just for expressing their views you are bound to make them angry.

What's up with the (Skyrim) Nexus

NexusMods and Homophobia

Homophobia

This ban was long overdue. Kendo had stalked and harassed members on the nexus forums for years.

One of my good friends dezdimona was often persecuted by Kendo just because she was transgender. Over several years he stalked dezdimona on nearly every website she visited. In the end she had to change her username and even her phone number. Kendo lives in Texas and had allegedly phoned her up on several occasions. Dezdimona is no longer with us due to cancer. Kendo had previously been banned in the past and this was his second account.

Several users have highlighted that they were abused for being homosexual or transgender. In this instance I actually applaud Vampire Dante for banning this individual, it was long over due. Hopefully Kendo will not get reinstated this time.

Reason for the ban

• Arguing with staff
• Harassment of site staff
• Attempting to dictate how the site is run

You had been here long enough to know that trying to dictate to the staff how we do things was never going to do anything but land you in trouble.

Deciding to push your personal disagreements on one of our staff, and to imply that any action taken by the staff here is done due to some personal agenda or dislike of yourself or your political stance is both insulting and wrong.

You don't agree with the rules here, and how they are processed and instigated - fine. In most circumstances I would simply ask you to leave if you wished. Seeing as how you prefer people to be definitive in their actions and be honest with you, I will be. You have become the problem you suspected we thought you were - your attitude towards us and how we carry out our duties on site was both aggressive and foolish, you handled the matter terribly. Instead of contacting Robin with your concerns, you decided to pick and push at us until someone pushed back.

So here I am pushing you, and your files out the door. Take your toys and do not darken our doorstep again.

Link:

Over the top

Another absolutely crazy ban. In this instance the user was simply banned because his user name contained a reference to cannabis.

People who use AdBlock Plus are filthy scum bags

Robin Scott the owner of NexusMods wrote this on his blog in 2007. He clearly states his opinion on anybody who blocks adverts when browsing the internet. Here is a quote directly from his blog.

People who use AdBlock Plus are filthy scum bags

November 10th, 2007 | Category: Personal, Web development Editor’s comments: some people, mostly Americans not used to my personal flavour of humour, have taken personal offense to this article. The idea when reading is that, with most blog posts (and especially mine) you take the article with a big pinch of salt. All is not as it seems.. Lets not beat around the bush on this one; if you’re one of those people who sings the praises of AdBlock Plus, the plugin for FireFox that allows users to broadly disable advertising on all the websites they visit, then you’re a filthy scum bag. But we’re all filthy scum bags really. Only the other day I was bored in my Marketing lecture and managed to amuse myself by flicking bogies at a nearby sloan girl (the skill is aiming for those girls that have that deliberate “out of bed” frizzy style hair that just screams “define me”). But still, if you use AdBlock Plus, you’re scum.

I’ve had pretty hard-line views on the subject for quite some time now. As the owner of TESNexus (nexusmods), a popular video game site that is very resource and bandwidth intensive, I began taking personal offense to the members of the site forums who would openly suggest using AdBlock Plus, or similar applications, to circumvent the advertising on the site. As offenses go, I’d say it’s up there with those gimps who work behind the tills in nightclubs who think, just because you’ve drunk too much, you can’t count your change.

I’m willing to be realistic about this; I can see certain uses for an ad blocker. One of those uses doesn’t include financially raping those webmasters who run an honest resource for community members with good quality advertising. In the interest of keeping the peace, what I advocate is a more subjective use of adblock programs, rather than a “fuck them all” approach. These programs allow users to specify whether all ads are blocked, or just ads on specific sites. So here’s a clue, why not block sites that you subjectively view are taking the piss when it comes to advertising? I’m sure we’ve all been to those sites that manage to trigger massive brain hemorrhages with their epileptic flashing colours, ads that scream out in some tard-tastic yank accent that you’ve won a free iPod or ads that bounce around the screen, and even when you click that tiny little “x” in the corner to close the ad it seems to think you’re interested in what they’re selling. OK, that’s lame, and no one wants to experience that, so at this point, why not block the ads for this particular site? Then again, the only sites that do that these days are porn sites, or sites with nil content, so you’ve got to start questioning your own browsing habits if you’re experiencing this shit regularly.

If you’re one of those Adblock users who has this retarded idea that advertising has no effect on them and turning off the ads is perfectly acceptable, I’m going to be blunt: you’re an idiot, and you’re wrong. Use the internet or go do some psychology night classes. Irrespective of whether you think you pay attention to advertising or not, the whole point of it being there is to provide revenue to the webmaster, revenue used to help pay for the site you are using. There are plenty of blog articles and internet bitch fights on the net about this shit that normally revolve around some headline grabbing, middle-aged codpiece referencing the concept of adblocking = theft, and I’m not going to do it here (you dirty thieving shits). Instead I’m going to take the high-ground and avoid all the name calling and hype phrases and get to the point: using ad blockers in your browser is your prerogative, in the same way that downloading the latest episode of Lost to satisfy your bleak concept of imagination via bittorrent is also your prerogative. Just don’t start whining like a bitch when the original sites you use start limiting your bandwidth, or doing similar things to screw you back.

I’ve been toying with the idea of limiting the download speed of users on TESNexus who are using adblocking programs. Rather than completely screwing them over by blocking them completely, or doing something ridiculously thickwitted, I’ll continue to provide the site for the entire community, including the dickheads and thick shits who blanket block all advertisements on all sites irrespective of circumstance, but simply limit the download speed for files to something rather small, say, 20kb/sec. No problem for those hill-billies still on dial-up, but those guys are so backwards already that I’m sure any reputable advertisers wouldn’t want their interest anyway (yes, haha, except broadband ISPs).