Passing on the 5mods torch...
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When I first started working on GTA5-Mods.com a little over two years ago, I really had no idea what it would become. I was coming from my admin position at GTA4-Mods.com where I was involved with website development and mod approvals, but this site has turned out to be a whole other beast - in a good way! There's no denying that GTA modding has "gone mainstream" with GTA V after the countless IGN and PC Gamer articles, YouTube live streams, and let's not forget an Angry Plane or two. It's been a huge pleasure being able to support this growing community over the years with the site and to work with the thousands of talented modders and millions of downloaders that made it all happen and helped me grow both as a web developer and as a person.
As the site keeps growing, so do its needs for content moderation and feature enhancements. I haven't always been able to keep up with the amount of amazing feature requests from all of you, as you may be able to tell from the growing queue in the Site Feedback forum! I've been operating the site as a hobby of mine for the past two years knowing that I couldn't always dedicate the increasing amount of time that it was requiring.
All these reasons are why it's bittersweet for me to announce that I'll be stepping down as administrator of GTA5-Mods.com and handing over the reins to @Dark0ne, @MrMason and their staff, who you may recognize from the popular modding site Nexus Mods. Over the years I've received a steady stream of people offering to become administrators and mod approvers, to partner up with the site or to merge with it, but I never felt confident that these people would be able to continue the site's legacy. When @Dark0ne approached me and we started discussing the site and modding community in general, I knew it could be a good fit. I started remembering all the times I got a feature request that ended with "...like they do on Nexus Mods" and I knew that his staff would be able to provide the tender love and care that this site deserves. Though GTA5-Mods.com will continue to operate the way it does today, I've seen the awesome modding hub that @Dark0ne and his staff have in the works for the future of Nexus Mods, and I'm confident it'll be a huge, much-needed step for the entire modding community when it's complete. Starting today, they will be your go-to for website-related questions, feedback and reports. I'm hoping you'll join me in welcoming them to the GTA5-Mods.com community and continuing to support the site for years to come. Onwards to GTA 6!
Thanks again for all your support, and I will surely keep in touch with you all here on the forums
- rappo
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Thank you for the awesome welcome, Rappo!
I'm going to put the TL;DR at the top of this post for just-in-case reasons and say that very, very little on 5Mods is changing any time soon. The site is remaining the same, there's no plans for any sort of merge with Nexus Mods at this time, and any changes are going to be mostly quality of life alterations in the short term.
With that out the way, I'll be short and sweet and simply say that it's both an honour and exciting to be able to take over the reigns of a site and community as large and established as 5Mods. As a very brief bio, my name is Robin, I'm 30 years old and I live in the UK. I've been running NexusMods.com for coming on 16 years now and I'm proud to be able to host so many awesome mods for so many great games.
Anyway, enough of that, back to 5Mods.
I've been conversing with Rappo for going on 5 months now about anything and everything to do with this community, and while I have a lot to learn about the ins and outs, I'm eager to do my very best.
I want to keep things as "normal" as possible for all of you both in terms of how the site looks and works, but also in how it's moderated and maintained. This isn't about bringing and forcing Nexus Mods rules, styles and etiquettes on to 5Mods, this is about keeping 5Mods as 5Mods for the foreseeable future.
In the very short term we're already making one change right now which I hope isn't frowned upon too much.
We're in the process of finding the right place for our ad slots and unfortunately this does mean changing a few placements as our advertisers are a bit strict on placement -- normally to improve the browsing experience for you. For example, we're not allowed to place ads in places where you could easily mistake a placement for actual content on the site i.e. we can't put a box ad amongst all the search results on the site in case new users mistakenly click the ad thinking it's a file. It also helps to prevent those pesky "Download button" ads from confusing users further. Unfortunately, that's exactly where a lot of the ads currently are (or were) on 5Mods.
Instead, we need to make distinct areas for ads, typically in a "header and footer" system and we must try and keep these placements as uniform as possible. This means having the same number of ad placements on every page. The result is that on some of the pages of the site you'll see less ads than before, but no pages will have more ads than before Rappo passed the site on to us. So it'll either be the same number of ad placements, or less. Right now, it's turning out to be less on quite a few pages.
Obviously 5Mods is quite custom and a one size fits all approach isn't going to work, but we're trying to find the best locations possible that don't detract from the content of the site or confuse users and at the same time trying to remain as sympathetic as possible to the site's format.
I apologise if we get this wrong initially and I would be happy to listen to feedback, within reason, on how we can make the ad placements look better or fit better moving forward. I understand a lot of you are using AdBlockers so this isn't a major issue for these users.Moving on to the short term (as opposed to the "right now") it is my intention, moving forward, to change the site so it allows for instant approval of new file uploads without the need for admin interaction at the upload stage.
To combat any potential issues that can arise from this we will bolster the moderation team here at 5Mods to ensure the current rules are being followed properly and that any files that don't fit the uploading criteria are handled swiftly. Similarly, we will also look into implementing VirusTotal scans on all new file uploads, much like we have on Nexus Mods, to ensure peace of mind. This is a system that works very well at Nexus Mods and I am confident the same can work at 5Mods, thus reducing massively the delay on releasing new files to the site while also reducing your reliance on me as a bottleneck.
I hope to consult 5Mods users on this topic soon before I implement anything as I imagine it has the potential to spark some controversy.
In terms of "plans", that's it right now. We've got nothing else on the radar for 5Mods other than keeping things going as they always have as much as possible.
If you need to talk to an admin about any issues or for any issues that you would normally talk to Rappo about then your point of contact will now be myself.
As you can imagine, trying to wrap my head around all the inner workings of the site, your etiquettes and culture is almost overwhelming so it's going to take me a little while to get used to things, but I'm determined to do right by you all. So, please bear with me and point out when I goof up to help me learn quicker. I'm in constant contact with Rappo as well so between you all I'm confident I can continue the great work that's already gone on here at 5Mods.
Thank you.
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@rappo Thanks for these 2 years dude, when I found your site I was so happy and this never changed, I have this site open all the time, all days
Good luck with your life and next projects, and thanks for letting me to translate/improve this site with my native languages 
@MrMason @Dark0ne Welcome! Seems really interesting your purposes to improve the site, keeping forward for them. To be honest, I never knew about the existence of Nexus Mods, but maybe because I just do modding with GTA series (actually just GTA V). Anyway is good to know that this site will be managed by experienced and trusted people.
Maybe you don't know who I'm, but on my profile you can find a little description about me
I'll help you to translating the site to my native languages if you someday update the site titles/sections.Again, welcome to 5mods
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@rappo
"Even far, your ideas and your deeds will never be forgotten."Also thanks for letting me redo from scratch the translation of this site into my native language.
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@rappo I'll miss you the most , compared to anyone here. You will be here to talk to won't you?
As I have trusted every decision u made before , and your abilities, I'll continue to do so.
Welcome @Dark0ne & @MrMason , you won't ever be able to replace rappo, that's for sure, but since you have a great reputation , and rappo trusts you,
I and many here at the forum , welcome you, and we shall try our best to co-operare with you and to do things that need doing. As our dear admin rappo has instructed to do so.
I trust this is a move towards the future, and i guess overall moderation. I hope to see this website touch new heights. It has only been 2 years for me , coming here in this website, I love it the most out of all websites out there. And I know many others, who think the same.
Please take care of this website. @ Rappo did an amazing job, and as far as I am concerned , if he continued being an admin as always we, could do just fine without any more features added too quickly, but it's his decision not ours.
I will miss him, but as always I'm not afraid of changes and future.
Good luck with your new responsibilities. If you need any input from us do let us know.
Have a great new beginning . exciting times
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@rappo I'm really sad to hear this, also very happy to hear that the site is in good hands.
NexusMods is my second most visited site, coming right after gta5-mods, so I know @Dark0ne and @MrMason well. Welcome to the site and the forums, and I hope you'll enjoy running the site as much as rappo did.
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@Rappo ima miss you dude I remember my first mod sniff, you were like we need in game screens
RIP RAPPO
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Hey boss, I suspect a day of mixed emotions in your end. I am sure that you have your reasons for passing on the GTA5Mods torch. I have deeply enjoyed working for you, with you, and with the other moderators, this community has so many talented and supportive members. The site is without a doubt the go-to destination for GTA PC modders. You have done an amazing job facilitating and nurturing this community.
I am sad to see you go.
I know though that people have their own matters to consider and I respect that. So I sincerely with you all the best and I thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this great success.
DarthPungz
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Hello and welcome!
I am hopeful that the GTA5MODS community will continue to operate smoothly and to grow as it has in the past years. I look forward to getting to know you and your team.
Please let me know if and how I can be of continued service here as the site and the forums evolve.
DarthPungz
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Welcome! I don't know any of you but, based on what you said, I can tell you're going to either keep the site as it is, or improve it in the long run, so that's awesome
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@jkrzd yes soon.
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@rappo why so suddenly...?
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I apologise if we get this wrong initially and I would be happy to listen to feedback, within reason, on how we can make the ad placements look better or fit better moving forward. I understand a lot of you are using AdBlockers so this isn't a major issue for these users.
These changes would make me turn off my ad blocker for this website at least. I have no idea what other users will do here, though the approach on Nexusmods is non-intrusive and made me whitelist that too. (Also having a non-intrusive banner asking you to turn off the ad blocker would be nice too).
We've had some (a lot of spam), so some form of captcha for the first few posts, or time-based limitations would be appreciated.
My more personal requests would be to allow for formatting of mod descriptions in Markdown (like here on the forums) and maybe some way to self-tag your mods, and a more convenient way of sorting by tags.
Also - please don't even consider a paid mods idea. It didn't go well for Skyrim, and that community is both huge and seemed well-tuned. This community - no offense - is much less in both of those points. I'd hate to see this platform die, because it's the only large hub with comments + forums integrated. Since we're also talking about modding a game where the original developers (or rather, who owns the developers) have an anti-modding perspective on this all, going the paid mods route would pretty much be a death sentence for most mainstream modding (on this platform). We're already so extremely reliant on ScriptHookV and OpenIV, of which the authors/maintainers don't seem to align with the rest well. Check GTAForums to see how they handle most things. In general, check GTAForums and this forum for the overall mood of GTA 5 modding.
@rappo
Thanks for you work! You've always been quick to reply to questions and requests and even though you were personally checking everything, admin approvals went pretty quick. I hope you'll be still coming back now and then.
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So, 'cashing-in' time then? Too bad. Thnx grandmaster @rappo for enabling us to share the wealth.
Hope to see you again on a gta6-mods
Welcome to the new admins.
May they be fair and work hard for us!
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Seeya, @rappo.
Thanks for what you did. A lot.
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@rappo Thanks for all the time you've spent being here for everyone..
Good continuation !
Hope the new team will have a similar way of thinking, welcome and good luck !
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@rappo Sorry to see you go, rappo. All the best in your future endeavors.
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@rappo
oh.... T_T
i got your help and cheers a lot since i made mods...
thank you so much.
I wish your future is full of happiness.
and hope to see you'll be back-
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@rappo You did a great job in these 2 years! all your work so far is really apprecieated and i want to wish u all the best with the things u are gonna do from now on!
Cheers mate, and welcome new team!
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@rappo Love you dad.... They let a clothing mod slip into the weapons catagory
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@420x420 lol, please report it right away, so that something can be done about it. Asap
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@420x420 Same thing but with two Misc mods that are in the Scripts section. Reported one of them yesterday, the other today.
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@Jitnaught Thanks for reporting.
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@FoxtrotDelta I reported it like this morning and they've done nothing about it lol
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@420x420 they will. the website is being upgraded and many slots beings re-assigned. in comming weeks it's going to be overhauled.
