Where do you stand on voluntary donations? Having slightly more cash than I did ten years ago, I've found myself finally getting round to chucking a tenner or so to the greats of freeware. Daemon tools, Mp3 tag, Audacity etc. I quite like that model.
I've donated to people and places in the past. There's someone who makes stuff for the same thing I make stuff for, who's well trusted and well liked, and she allows bulk downloading if you donate just once - you get a password. I've donated to her. I also paid to be a supporter of Nexus back when I was playing the original Skyrim - it gave me access to faster download servers. I haven't donated to anyone who just has a 'donate' button.
A lot of people use url shorteners like ad.fly, which make you sit for 5 seconds and see an ad (or blank space if you have an adblocker) before you get to the actual download. I hate that shit. With a passion. I use a chrome extension to bypass it. Same for the repository site that makes you wait for 60 seconds to download something if you have your adblocker active, 10 seconds if you don't, and the ads are objectionably huge, numerous, and garish. That shit just pisses me off, and I'll either find a way around it or nope out of the site altogether.
As long as something is still available without having to pay, in theory I have no problem with donations.
Quite apart from the sneaky, creeping way publishers and devs will try to monetise this shit (like Bethesda is keeps doing), which of course I'm against out of principle, I don't like the implications for a fractured community. Modding communities are at their best when people work for the greater good, helping each other out, sharing resources. It's healthier, it allows for more cross-pollination of ideas and collaboration, and it's just friendlier and more welcoming. It's socialist, dammit
There's a project that's been ongoing since Skyrim first came out called STEP - the Skyrim (something beginning with T, Total maybe?) Enhancement Project. A group of people got together to test and list all the mods that would improve the game visually and in terms of fixing bugs, and with some additions to gameplay, making sure they all worked together with no conflicts. They put together loads of information on how to prepare your game for installing mods, how to install them, in what order, how to troubleshoot stuff, etc. There was one large visual mod back in the day that formed a core part of the STEP install, but the guy started asking people for money to download it, so he got kicked off Nexus and he eventually disappeared. Nothing else ever quite plugged the hole that left behind, although people tried well enough. STEP still exists, but it's just one example of how one or a few people deciding to try to monetise their stuff can have a negative impact on the community as a whole. STEP's a great initiative that can help people maintain a stable (relatively speaking) modded Skyrim, but as soon as you start getting people peeling their mods away and putting them up behind paywalls of one sort or another it all falls apart and the community and regular players suffer as a result.
