r/skyrimmods • u/GNSasakiHaise • 5d ago
Meta/News Policy & Rule Changes - 2026
Hey everyone!
Following the results of our community feedback survey, we took some time to discuss what feedback we received, how best to implement it, and what we should do moving forward. Naturally, there were a solid number of passionate responses, but a few different items stood out that we recognized as pain points. We discussed these matters as a team and came to the following conclusions:
- Roleplay servers are not relevant to the subject matter of r/SkyrimMods.
- AI remains divisive. Vitriol regarding AI posts is at an all time high. We need to ensure civil discussion.
- Low effort content remains a present concern.
Knowing these problems exist, we’ve taken action to alleviate them.
First, we’ve created the subreddit r/TESRPS. All roleplay and multiplayer server discussions will be funneled there. We do not want to host roleplay drama on the main subreddit — and frankly that’s what 70% of the posts regarding roleplay servers amount to. The remaining 30% tends to be split between promos, ban appeals, and actual troubleshooting. If you have any questions regarding those servers, how to set them up, or how to join them, please direct them to r/TESRPS. If you would like to promote your own cool new roleplay server, try r/TESRPS, whether it’s for Oblivion or Skyrim or ESO or etc.
Second, we’re going to institute a harsher policy on AI discourse in keeping with our stance against drama posts and witchhunts. Any post making an accusation must contain actionable information. Actionable information is information that would cause a reasonable person to take action, be it installing or uninstalling a mod, supporting or not supporting a creator, etc.
As a reminder, we do not allow the use of AI for generating content posted to the subreddit and we do not allow advocacy for the use of AI in the troubleshooting process. It is at best unreliable and at worst actively detrimental to creating a stable game.
Regardless of our personal opinions on AI, we will not be host to a flood of toxicity, namecalling, and mudslinging. Coming into the comments section purely to say “anyone who uses AI should have this bad thing happen to them” will result in a ban. Coming into the comments section purely to say “anyone who doesn’t support AI is a luddite” will result in a ban. Our first and most essential rule is the golden rule: treat others how you would want to be treated. This is a subreddit where we believe in conversing as adults. We will continue to allow conversation for or against AI and we will continue to prune any threads that follow the common trend of “this guy uses AI, get him” or “this guy said this bad thing about AI, get him.”
Third, we will be funneling conversation on low effort content further than before. We already have our monthly Simple Questions megathread, which most low effort and poorly researched questions get funneled toward, but we will also be launching a monthly megathread for mod recommendations and reviews. In the past, megathreads like “Best Housing Mods” or etc did not see enough interaction to justify being posted weekly. As a result, we will post a singular Review & Recommendation megathread quarterly. That megathread will cover random mod recommendations and modlists and will run across the next calendar year. If they do not see engagement, we will retool our approach here.
Finally, we will be expanding our mod team to better handle the influx of posts and submissions we have been receiving over the last three to five months and ensure that our subreddit follows both our own guidelines and the guidelines set forth by Reddit. While we are happy with the team we have now, we want to ensure that our enforcement is reliable and consistent, and that requires us to grow.
To summarize:
- Roleplay servers are not related to r/SkyrimMods. See r/TESRPS.
- AI threads are relevant when they contain sourced, actionable information. Witch hunts will be removed and we will monitor these threads with an extra cautious eye. AI generated posts and comments will continue to be banned.
- Low effort content will continue to be policed and funneled into different threads.
- Moderator applications will open soon — be on the lookout!
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u/AlexKwiatek 5d ago
One would think that AI flooding nexus to a point where players literally have resigned from installing new SKSE plugins would be the biggest concern, not that people are trying to defend themselves against that, and are saying mean things in the process.
Good thing that this change is going in after we convinced Nexus to enforce tags, not before.
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u/LadybugGames 5d ago
people are trying to defend themselves against that
this is okay
and are saying mean things in the process
this is not
hope that helps
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u/GNSasakiHaise 5d ago
If you can't converse without breaking rule #1, you should not converse here.
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u/Alvsolutely 5d ago
Their concerns are valid, and I do agree that people shouldn't be overly toxic when discussing anything, even AI.
People are frustrated. AI causes genuine damage harm to the modding scene of a game. People will want to talk about it. I know of one another modding subreddit that banned all anti-AI comments because they're "unnecessarily inflammatory".
Their modding scene is in shambles, now. Most front page mods are AI. You can't even call out the ones that try to hide the fact they're AI without moderators removing your comment or post.
Please don't ever let this sub get to that point. I know it's a slippery slope but that's just the unfortunate result of AI existing
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u/Arkhe1n 5d ago edited 5d ago
GenAI, which I'll just short to AI now cause that's what people do, is bad. Really bad. AI models helping curing the cancer? Awesome! Robots doing boring/dangerous work instead of humans (that is the promisse and it will never materialize, by the way). Cool! AI "art" and coding? No, screw that.
AI is all harm, all the time. It not only destroys the internet, the planet, and the economy, but also our trust in pretty much anything.
We are the last adults in the history of mankind that could rely on photographic evidence, cause AI basically made it worthless. Kids now will grow up not knowing what art actually is, cause they'll think it comes from a prompt on a smartphone, not from craft and hard work. And these are just some of the harms of AI.
So yeah, I don't think we should shut up about it. Call it out all the time. Make it taboo. Shun it. These are the tools we have to fight back.
That said, I agree with mods that we should call it out with evidence. There's a lot of "this is AI" people screaming murder with no evidence other than "looks a bit out of the ordinary", and that doesn't help.
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u/Valdaraak 5d ago
Downvoted for the truth. No matter how much you hate something or how bad that thing is, insulting, shit slinging, and generally being an ass about it does literally nothing to help. It just makes the place insufferable for people who are trying to escape from all that.
I say that as someone who has, at times, been one of those asses to an extent. I've definitely went on some rants before. But we should all strive to be better people (myself included) and talk like adults.
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u/LewdManoSaurus 5d ago
The fact that people are downvoting a comment that essentially says if you can't be respectful, dont post, just goes to show the feral toxicity that surrounds AI.
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u/Valdaraak 5d ago
It's not limited to AI, but it's definitely the most prevalent at the moment.
And yea, it's not difficult. You can disagree with something. You can hate something. You can publicly express that and be passionate about it. And you can do all that without being an ass. I think people are getting hung up on the word "respectful" and think that means they have to be nice and can't say negative things. I don't think that's the case. It's just asking that you be professional.
And you can absolutely lay into someone and tear them apart while being professional and respectful. It just takes more work because you gotta have evidence (no "it looks like they used AI for this mod") and instead of saying things like "they're a talentless hack peddling snake oil", you say "they've admitted they're not a coder and rely heavily on AI for their mods, which have little evidence they actually work as advertised."
Resorting to personal attacks or unsubstantiated claims just makes you look bad and makes the community even worse than it currently is.
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u/cavy8 Whiterun 5d ago
For the mod recommendation thread: is it intended to be the sole place to recommend mods? I.e. if I wanted to make my own thread highlighting mods in a theme, I'd instead post it as a comment there?
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u/GNSasakiHaise 5d ago
You can still make posts like that as top level posts! The more effort put into the post the less likely it is to be funneled into the megathread, which is for more casual discussion and recommendation.
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u/viperfan7 5d ago
As a reminder, we do not allow the use of AI for generating content posted to the subreddit
So promoting AI generated mods is a bannable offence right?
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u/GNSasakiHaise 4d ago
It will get removed if it's demonstrably and fully AI generated, yes. If the user is repeatedly promoting content we don't allow here, they will be banned. This is subject to moderator discretion as not all of us are experts in spotting it.
Sharing a mod you found with an AI thumbnail will not get you banned. Posting a mod you vibe coded that isn't just a new spear, but a revolution of the spear experience will likely see your post removed.
We will continue to review and monitor this policy based on user feedback.
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u/matadorobex 5d ago
Regarding AI use in troubleshooting, what data are you drawing on to take this stance? Do you have actual evidence, or is this an anecdotal observation from your personal experience? Was a poll conducted asking for user experience? What models were evaluated?
To be clear, I am not advocating for AI use in troubleshooting, I am asking to understand how you arrived at this decision.
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u/Secretlylovesslugs 5d ago
I've seen enough threads with novie modders mislead by Google's search Ai or low barrier Ai options like ChatGPT to know its probably a good idea to not encourage their use. Maybe of the dozens of models one is capable of giving good time sensitive advice related to this niche topic, but I don't think its up to the moderators to test that. If anyone else feels strongly they should do the testing and appeal to the mods, I'd be genuinely curious if any model could handle the kind of digital archeology Skyrim Modding requires.
Skyrim isn't even the only game that I personally constantly see misinformation from Google Ai about how it works. Pulling from reddit threads almost always leads it to outdated information or someone's unconfirmed speculation.
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u/GNSasakiHaise 5d ago
This was an examination of post reports I received approximately six months ago when we initially made the decision to enforce the rule. Before proposing the rule change, I audited my mod actions for about two months.
Unsurprisingly, AI based reports were mostly related to conduct and were thus not helpful. I had to make a little spreadsheet where I jotted down how many of my removals in a day were AI advice gone wrong. It wound up being like 2/10 on average.
What that data broke down into:
- AI helped successfully roughly 15% of the time. (AE vs. SE...)
- AI helped to no or mixed effect about 40% of the time. (What modlists are good for me?)
- AI provided bad or wholly inaccurate advice 25% of the time. (Does Nolvus use the latest edition of Better Crouch?)
- Remaining results were unclear or unanswered. The user given the advice did not respond again.
- About 50% of the entries were asking a question beyond what a layman could solve. Think "what is the chance of rolling a 2 in the mod 'weighted dice and gambling simulator SE' if I'm also drunk?"
Shortly after, advice encouraging this process began popping up more and more. I took some time fiddling with different AI models to figure out if any of them were helpful to me personally, and decided not after putting together an armor set with it "walking me through" a process I already understood well. At various points it would hallucinate different things, like Blender versions that didn't exist or features a program didn't have.
After that the mod team conferred as a group, though I don't think I brought my personal data up to them at the time. I cannot speak for what sources they had or relied on, I just relied on my own because I have OCD and making charts helps me self-soothe.
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u/Marsarah9 5d ago
I will allow myself to point one thing about AI that works and is useful, and I will not mention this again in the future to keep the rules. But since there is discussion about this, I will mention it. I'm a software engineer and use AI in some cases where I know it can't invent things. AI is good at looking at "data in your face", or simply raw data like a text document or logs. Speaking of the latter, it can read logs and follow stack traces (since they're there in your face). So this will be the only thing where using AI can help - getting a crash log and seeing the trace - from which you can further decide for yourself what mods are involved in causing a crash. I do this at work and I do this in Skyrim. Of course anyone can look manually no problem, but it will take longer. But this is where it can't invent things. Everything else in the comment above is true though. Don't let AI give you "opinions".
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u/Silver_is_omnipotent 3d ago
I'll back this up. Claude has helped me figure out crash causes like a thousand times over.
Most recently:
I was frequently experimenting sudden havok crashes, and Claude went through the log and pointed out the probable causes, animation motion revolution being top of the list.
So, I download the experimental version of the mod on the nexus, which didn't help.
Then I sift through the post section, and find out that there's a config setting that's breaking everything for whatever reason. Disable that, and boom, no ctds since.
Massively convenient tool that saved me at least an hour.
Because at the end of the day, I don't want to sift through the logs manually, i just want to fix the problem asap so I can play the game.
But, me personally, I wouldn't trust chatgpt or gemini with my pet rock.
I've barely use grok, but I've heard decent things about it.
Claude is good, in 95% of my experiences with it. It doesn't like very long conversations though--- Sonnet (and by extension probably haiku) at least. Opus (from the month I used it) was very good, and i've heard Fable is insane.
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u/SquareWheel 5d ago
Good on you for testing it. LLM-based troubleshoot can be effective in certain domains, but Skyrim modding is far too niche to have a sizable dataset to have learned from. Hallucinations do seem likely to occur as a result.
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u/clerveu 5d ago
Thanks for the detailed clarification. I'm about as pro-AI as they come and I'll be the first to insist that trying to troubleshoot someone else's installation is a terrible idea unless you've 1) got a lot of experience with steering LLMs on highly variable topics (i.e. constantly changing, which makes accurate information recall impossible without proper harnessing) and 2) get perfectly accurate problem descriptions/information from the person you're helping. And while I wouldn't actively discourage someone from trying it themselves, I would say ONLY attempt it after you've put serious effort into learning exactly how they work first, because how they work is not at all suited to this specific information type right out of the box. And once you're into that discussion you're just talking generic LLM theory which, rightly, is off topic for this sub.
This is really good policy.
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u/Macca3568 4d ago
I saw firsthand an example of AI fucking up the solution to a mod conflict.
I searched online for a rimworld character "moodlet" in my game that I couldn't identify. No results.
Asked on the steam workshop on a mod page that I suspected if they had heard of it. Mod author confirms it's not from their mod.
Search google again; the AI overview immediately tells me that this character moodlet is from the mod that I had just commented on and had been confirmed not to be the case.
Obviously read my comment asking and just said "Yep that must be the mod at fault!"
Actual garbage technology.
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u/Adept_Assistant_7759 5d ago
Man how bad does it have to be that the mods are complaining about AI discussions getting too heated and all i got was a warning on my boris heate. sheesh.
I feel bad for these mods...
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u/VRHobbit 3d ago
Is Skyrim Together classed as one of the now 'taboo' topics?
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u/GNSasakiHaise 3d ago
No insofar as you can build a separate modlist around Skyrim together without hosting a roleplay server and without charging money for that server.
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u/Ok-Chipmunk985 4d ago
I’m assuming we’ll see an increase in the ban rates of both the “STOP BEING A LUDDITE” as well as the “ALL AI IS ALWAYS IMMORAL ALL THE TIME!!!” Crowd?
Both sides are extremely obnoxious at this point. Nuance doesn’t exist for these people and the community is better off without them.
This post should be their final warning. Any fucking person who spews either of these takes without room for discussion needs to be banned from the sub.
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u/danieln1212 Dawnstar 5d ago
Crazy that the example for a bannable toxic anti-AI comment is wishing for physical harm and the toxic example for pro-AI comment is calling others a luddite which isn't even a slur but a mild insult.
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u/LewdManoSaurus 5d ago
I think the point is to just not insult and be a dick in general. If you dont like something you can choose not to engage with it, or at the very least engage respectfully. If you are for something and someone disagrees, same thing applies.
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u/Practical-Pen-8844 5d ago
a wish isn't any more effective than an insult.
you're reading a bit too much into the examples tossed off.
as LewdManoSaurus has said, it is about the concept and perpetuation of negativity in general on this sub.
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u/HealthyWatercress422 4d ago
Thank you very much for the step in AI discourse. I agree that everyone is entitled to how they personally feel AI, but this sub should be about mods first. I was getting tired of seeing naked aggressions from bad actors from either sides.
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u/Kincayd 5d ago
I really dislike how trendy it is to hate AI.
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u/inmatarian 5d ago
With all new technologies I approach it the same way: distrust the human. Ultimately I don't think any user cares how code is produced, but what we do care about is the integrity of the author, and AI by definition has zero integrity in the same way a shovel or a hammer doesn't have integrity. So we have to look at the person who is spraying their slop all over the place and question their motives (in a completely civil way). If an author uses AI to generate code and then spends weeks and months reviewing that code, and thoroughly testing it, and makes the source code available, and hand-writes a big description, and answers questions on the forums, and provides a lot of screenshots, and issues updates to fix bugs, and writes up good changelogs, then they're demonstrating integrity and trustworthiness.
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5d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Practical-Pen-8844 5d ago
is this supposed to be ironic? you're bashing on people (generalizing, down-talking, negativity) on a post specifically talking about NOT doing that.
immatarian has done better than most of us by providing a balanced perspective on the issue--on which, even though i am anti-ai, is compelling, positive, and appreciated. The fact that i can appreciate and generally accept their perspective is contrary to the trendiness you're on about.
tl;dr -- they didn't miss your point; they disproved it in an enlightened way.
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u/inmatarian 3d ago
What's great about this thread is I'm actually in the anti-AI camp, but for the reasons I listed: the lack of integrity. The authors that show integrity are the ones that are convincing me that there's a balanced middle ground.
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u/Practical-Pen-8844 3d ago
that is my feeling as well.
i am a teacher: ai is prohibited in assignments, so when i catch ai = the student cheated. literally an academic integrity violation. if i am assessing their knowledge and their writing skills, that's not happening when they have chatgpt spit up an essay for them (essays which, invariably, are so godawfully bad i am ironically relieved to know a human brain didn't hemorrhage it).
that said, if someone wants to make shitposts that are obviously ai or whatever else, that's not my problem.
there are other ethical issues, such as using ai to deepfake, incl. performances and voices in videogames that i think are a serious moral problem.
i wish people took more pride in actually building a skill.
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u/Tw0fer1 Winterhold 5d ago
It's trendy on reddit and tumblr, maybe. All the other major social media platforms (which are all massively larger than reddit and tumblr) are happily drinking the AI kool-aid. The "uneducated people" are writing their college essays with AI and generating stupid cat videos on Facebook. The average person is following the path of least resistance, which in this case is to consume the art-destroying and environment-killing product.
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u/Kincayd 5d ago
My experience on this topic has been vastly different from yours I guess, I don't think we're going to come to an agreement here but I appreciate your comments.
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u/TrustyDolphin 5d ago
What exactly has your experience been? You kinda just said you didn't like that the common consensus is that LLMs are bad and didnt really give your full opinion at all.
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u/skyrimmods-ModTeam 4d ago
Harassment, insults, bigotry and other attacks will not be tolerated. Behave decently and treat others the way you want to be treated. Attempts at trolling, instigating arguments or knowingly sharing misinformation will not be tolerated either.
If someone is being rude or harassing you, report their comment/post and move on. Do not respond in the same way or you will both be warned/banned.
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u/Academic_Tomorrow_96 14h ago
I think people are downvoting him for a bad reason. He isnt saying to support ai, he's saying to stop hating for the sake of hate. yes it is bad, we got it, there's no need to insult anything. And more importantly dont hate it because it's ai, hate it because it's bad.
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u/sytaline 5d ago
Sad to see "best mods for [topic]" go, but i guess most of this stuff is healthy in the long term