If you haven’t heard of it, Nexus Mods is one of the most popular mod sites out there. From Skyrim to Fallout to Witcher 3, there are so many mods on this site that you could probably find one for pretty much anything. On their site, they state that they include 317,580 files for 1,335 different games, and it seems like this number is going to rapidly grow.
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Recently, Nexus Mods made the decision to eliminate the possibility of deleting mods off the site. Now, instead of being deleted, mods will be archived. Archived mods will not be accessible unless directly requested.
Nexus Mods has explained their reasoning behind this, though it has only resonated with some. They explain that their core belief is making modding easier and that the best way for them to do this is through their new collections system.
They go into detail about what this collection system actually means, but the goal of it is to have more people spending time playing a modded game and less time worrying about mod conflicts. They explain that a “collection” is simply when someone uses Vortex to build a mod setup locally and then exports a meta file with all the information onto the site. After this, other users will be able to add this collection to Vortex and have all the files downloaded and installed the same way the original user did. You can read the full description of this process and what Nexus Mods is trying to accomplish on their website.
The goals are to add a great deal of convenience, encourage new mod users to appear because everything is more accessible, up the number of downloaded mods, and generally grow the community. It’s unclear as of now how effective this tactic will be.
Luckily, for those unhappy about the removal of the option to delete mods, Nexus Mods is allowing a one-month grace period for mod authors to delete all of their files for good before they’re archived instead.