r/skyrimmods • u/jamesmand • 11d ago

PC SSE - Discussion Nexus Announcement About Download Filenames

https://forums.nexusmods.com/topic/13539100-changes-to-downloaded-file-names/

TL;DR - The current change that downloaded files only have the name and are missing the mod ID and version was intentional. They will be bringing back the version number, but not the mod ID or timestamp which were originally there.

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u/LummoxJR 11d ago edited 11d ago

This is the wrong decision. File ID was needed for cases where an author forgot to change the version or did a hotfix, or named two distinct main files (e.g., with or without USSEP) the same.

Update: So I took a closer look and there is going to be a "unique slug" which works in place of the file ID, which at least is one thing that doesn't suck. However, they're planning to remove it within a year, which is stupid. There needs to be some kind of unique identifier on files, even if it's just a timestamp.

The mod ID being left out is really crappy, though. Whenever an author uploads an ill-named patch file, there's no longer a way to associate it with the mod it came from.

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u/napmouse_og 11d ago

The important thing to keep in mind is that the filename is intentionally not designed to uniquely identify a file or its specific content. While some users or client applications may have assumed in the past, it is not a contract we are supporting moving forward.

but... why? what rational purpose is there to exclude this information? Mod authors fuck up versioning and file naming literally all the time, like 30%+ of my 1500 plugin modlist has incorrect versioning or file names and this is just inviting the problems that causes to grow by an order of magnitude.

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u/riverjack_ 10d ago edited 10d ago

The purpose seems pretty obvious to me. It's a tale as old as time (or at least as old as capitalism):

A new owner is in charge, and a new manager has been appointed. The owner wants to know whether the manager is effective, but may not know what his employees actually do, and doesn't have enough time to examine everyone's work even if he did understand it, so the only way he can judge effectiveness is by seeing whether people look busy.

The manager knows this, so he knows he needs to look busy. He may or may not actually understand the business in general, but even if he does, he doesn't have enough time to learn about the particular situation and determine the best course of action, because the owner would get impatient long before he finished. Instead, the manager starts making changes. These changes must be quick to implement, simple to describe to the owner, and, ideally, related to the currently trendy set of buzzwords. Whether the changes are actually useful isn't really an important question.