Hey all!
I just wanted to give everybody an update on what’s going on in the community. I also want to give an update on my life since a lot has happened that has been impacting my activity here.
If you haven’t already, I recommend giving the following topic a read as it was a large update I posted last December that goes into deeper detail on my upcoming plans for the community.
Life Update
I usually feel uncomfortable when sharing anything negative in my life to the public, but I’ve found that writing about my recent experiences has helped a lot. So I’m just going to go with it.
To put it short, I’m having the roughest couple months of my life. My Mom passed away from pancreatic cancer in early June (story if anybody is interested). I was very close to her and she was my best friend.
I’ve also lost a couple of dogs (one right before my Mom’s death and the last dog was today) and I had to move out of my family home of 24 years quickly. My life has changed completely.
Although things have been really rough, I have been okay and taking care of myself. I just don’t want anybody to worry or anything!
I may have more inactivity in the future because I’m getting more contract work and I also want to start up my separate IT company. I’m very passionate about TMC though and I’m trying my best to find time to work on it!
Top Mods Update
In the announcement topic I linked at the beginning of the topic, I’ve mentioned making topics that contains the top x mods of specific games from sources like the Steam Workshop.
A little bit of time after this announcement, I decided to create a tool that automatically retrieves the top x mods every week, month, or year from the Steam Workshop since I have a lot of experience with web scraping and automation
This tool retrieves the following information from each mod.
- Banner image
- Name (+ URL to mod source)
- Author (+ URL to workshop profile)
- Downloads and views count
It also retrieves the mod’s description and sends it through ChatGPT’s API. It asks ChatGPT to summarize the mod in 5 - 6 sentences. It uses this output as the mod description when posted in the topic.
When I finished the tool and initially launched it internally back in December, 2024, I only added support for a few games (L4D2, Halo: MCC, Skyrim, and Garry’s Mod). I also wanted to approve the topics before becoming public, so the tool sends all topics it creates to a private category on this forum.
I configured the tool to retrieve the top 10 mods weekly, top 20 mods monthly, and top 30 mods yearly. There were a few topics made for all time periods and games which I released to the public in early 2025. However, I gave up on reviewing the topics after a couple of months due to my life issues.
Fast forward to recently, I’ve started working on the tool again. I fixed a few issues that I didn’t get around to and improved the topic formats.
Here is a list of things I’ve changed.
- The topic title and body format has been improved.
- The download and view counts are now included in the topic.
- Weekly top mod topics are now disabled due to too much spam and it also saves a bit of money from the ChatGPT API.
- Added support for many new games including Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Cities Skylines: II, and Portal 2!
When the initial top mod topics were made public, they weren’t retrieving much SEO traffic. However, they’ve all been retrieving a lot more views this Summer which is what made me want to re-launch the tool.
My biggest concern with the tool is the ChatGPT generated mod descriptions. While I try to customize the descriptions personally so they’re more human-like, there are many I don’t get around to nor do I have the time to. I’ve looked at a lot of the generated responses and I think most of them are fine in terms of the descriptions themselves (other than telling it’s obviously made with AI). There are also times when the mod description doesn’t provide useful information resulting in the generated response making no sense at all (not sure what we can do about that other than moderate and fix them by human). I guess we’ll have to see how users feel. I can also adjust settings through the ChatGPT API to improve the quality of the generated descriptions at some point in the future.
I do think the idea and goal of the topics are pretty neat though. From the people I’ve talked to, everybody seemed to really like the idea, even with the ChatGPT generated descriptions.
I think adding things like the mod rating and download/view count differentials (between the last updates) would make users more interested as well.
Speaking of which, here is a list of things I will be adding to the tool.
- Tracking and including the mod’s rating in the topic.
- Tracking mod download and view counts.
- This allows us to include things like download and view count differentials.
All in all, I believe this project is off to a good start, but we’ll have to see how things go. If you’re interested in viewing some of the most up-to-date top mod topics, I’ve linked some below.
New Guides
As some people may have noticed from the recent spam of topics, I’ve created a lot of guides. I was away for the whole week and didn’t have access to my home lab and development servers. So I spent all week just making guides whenever I could instead lol.
I ended up making guides that are much shorter than what I normally make. That said, admittedly, I’ve been using ChatGPT to provide me an outline on most guides where I’m unfamiliar with the game, but I pretty much end up rewriting what it gives me since I need to verify everything anyways. I just like using it as a starting point.
Since I’ve been trying to pump out more guides, I haven’t been including any screenshots or videos as well. I’d really like to go back through in the future and add screenshots and videos. The general quality of the guides can be improved on as well.
I mentioned in a lot of these guides that they’re a work-in-progress. This is because I believe in most cases, a guide needs to be updated over time. Also, as mentioned above, I really do want to improve on the guides as time goes on and add screenshots/videos for steps and such.
I believe these guides will help a lot with getting traffic to the website. I’m also hoping we can get more people to our Discord server from the guides (people may need help, etc.).
I also plan on making more guides in the future whenever I have the time. I really do enjoy creating them!
Here are some guides I’ve recently made.
New Landing Page For ModdingCommunity.com
Tonight, I ended up creating and deploying a temporary landing page for the community that includes links to the forum and Discord server.
I’d also like to improve the temporary landing page a bit in the future. I’m not sure what else I can add to it, but I was thinking about using different fonts and perhaps add some sort of background image?
It is open source if anybody is interested!
Discord Server
In the announcement I linked above, I mentioned I had plans to revamp our Discord server. I believe this is going to be made a higher priority since the forum and Discord server are the only public things we have right now.
From the top mods and recent guides, we may have a larger amount of people join our Discord server over the next few months. Therefore, I’d really like to revamp that whenever I can.
As of right now, I don’t have any additional information on what I plan on doing to the server. I haven’t really looked into it, but I do want to move on from clicking role selections and use more modern solutions. I also want to put more of a focus on support and such.
New Website Update
I haven’t worked on the new website in the last few months due to my life issues. However, I did make a lot of progress on it earlier in the year.
I’ve created a lot of useful back-end code for the mod workshop and server browser along with some okay-ish front-end code. The biggest thing is how the front-end looks and admittedly, that’s an area I’ve struggled in. However, I do have friends who are much more experienced that want to help out in the future which is great!
I am planning to start working on the website again soon! This website is going to be the most important part of our community in the future.
That’s It!
I don’t have anything more to comment on at this time. The above is what I’m primarily focused on right now.
I will most likely start posting updates regarding the new website more frequently once I start working on its development again.
Thank you for reading!