Welcome to ModTheSims2
Mod the Sims 2 exists to provide modders and game content creators a place to share knowledge regarding the creation of supplementary game enhancements for The Sims 2 video game. Players from all over the world use these resources to learn how to create their own game content and to improve their game playing experience.
MTS2 has 116,456 downloads, all free to registered members. Guests can view download information, but must register to download. Registration is totally free and we will not give your information out to anybody!
We also have 1706 modding tutorials and 127 Game FAQs, for the best in Sims 2 help and articles.
Please take a moment to Register with us. Registration is totally free as is all the content here!
Getting Started at MTS2
Site Rules & Guidelines - New to MTS2? Get a feel of how things are run on this site.
Site FAQ - Questions about the MTS2 website and general administrative details are answered here.
Creator Guidelines - Want to share your creations on MTS2, start here!
Meet & Greet - Introduce yourself to the MTS2 family.
Site News - What's New with MTS2?
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Hi All,
Back on the 2nd May 2004, when I first set up the CMS system that would become MTS2, little did I know that, 4 years later, the site would still be going strong, with millions of members joined, tens of thousands of people on per day, hundreds of thousands of items downloaded a month.
During the last 4 years we've seen a lot of changes around here. Many people have left, lots of new ones have joined, and stars have risen and fallen again.
We've had 1,941,679 members registered. And almost 1.3 million pruned for inactivity. ;) We've had at least 59,413 downloads posted on the site, including the very first one (which doesn't work anymore...), this one: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=30401. (If you are wondering the reason it starts at 30,401 is becuase I had to write a custom script to import e107 threads to vBulletin in Sept/Oct 2004, and didn't reset the auto_increment values).
We've been through at least 3 major download overhauls, one complete software change (e107 -> vBulletin), a heck of a lot of tweaks, improvements and modifications, and seen people leave to setup thier own sites. Of course, it's not been without the drama too, but I feel that at this point in it's history, what the site stands for and has become is far more important that all of that.
So, I would like to thank all of the staff - current and past - all of the creators - featured, picked or just people who want to share things, all of the people who say thanks, or even just click the thanks button and above all, you for visiting and reading this.
With the Sims 3 only a year or so away, this site is still going strong - over 40 million pageviews a month still, and some 16 million downloads. There is still a lot of life left here, and I wish you all the best of luck for another year.
Happy Birthday, MTS2! You've earned it...
Regards
Delphy and the MTS2 Staff
PS: Some interesting statistics:
Current member count: 646,470
Total members over time: 1,941,679
Total attachments: 373,629 taking up 113.5gb
Total downloads, all time: 284,239,950
Item with the most downloads: 155,982, here
Average users joining per day (2007-2008): 2,263
Average posts per day (2007-2008): 780
Average member visits per day (2007-2008): 27,856
(I'll add more here as I look them up :) |
by Delphy,
2nd May 2008 at
11:03 PM
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(111 comments)
(4974 views)
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Hi All,
I seem to be doing a lot of small optimisations lately... So much for retirement. But, hey, it's fun and keeps me busy. :)
Anyway some small changes today:
- Removed the query that checks for staff messages on every page refresh - now it is all handled by the PM system. Saves 1 query every page.
- Changed the Thanks display on download threads, so that the full list is only returned for the thread owner, rather than returned but not shown. Should speed up thread generation.
- Made the "Add to favourites" box dependant on the Thanks - now you can't add anything as a Favourite Download unless you have thanked it (which makes sense, but mostly becuase it also saves a query too)
- Some small optimisations with regards to template caching, but shouldn't change much
- Chii has been switched back to Apache2, since Apache1.3 seems to kill the box regularly :(
Updated / added 23rd April:
- Fixed bug where threads with no keywords would have an implode error at the top of showthread
- Possibly fixed bug with member.php and imploding arrays
- Added "Search PMs" box which, as the name suggests, searches PMs
- Hopefully fixed bug with 65536 unread PMs from staff
- Fixed bug where PMs from some staff would not get added to the pmsFromStaff value
- Removed the Online/Offline indicator from the profile page
- Removed all QX links from the site. This is now unsupported permenantly.
- Probably some other minor changes I have now totally forgotten about :)
The main thing you have to be aware of is the whole Thanks/Favourites thing. Otherwise it's all small stuff but should hopefully help a little.
Edit: a quick note about QXpress. The reason that MTS2 has stopped supporting it is twofold. Firstly, it does not work on a lot of peoples machines, has serious issues with Vista, and is horribly broken code, and secondly becuase I personally feel that it is is outdated and that we have FAQs and tutorials on how to install manually anyway. Yes, it still works on other sites, no those other sites are nothing like how MTS2 is setup, no I wont be fixing any bugs for QXpress, no those links wont be coming back.
Thats it for now.
Regards
Delphy |
by Delphy,
18th Apr 2008 at
11:29 PM
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(87 comments)
(10429 views)
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Hi All,
You are probably looking at the navbar and wondering "What the heck??" right now... if not, then I bet you are now.... :)
The following things have changed:
- The News dropdown now has 3 seperate news categories: Site News (for general info), Tech News (for tech and server info, ie my stuff) and Creator News (for challenges, creator guideline updates, etc)
- The News entries on the dropdown now link directly to the Site News forum, not About.php as before
- About has been moved down to the "Other" section of the News dropdown
- Live Chat has been removed off the News dropdown
- Site Issues has been removed off the News dropdown
- A new dropdown, "Site Links" has been added, which contains the New Posts, Site Map, and Quick Links links.
- Quick Links now no longer appear on the left of the navbar on the second row - they appear in a dropdown menu. This is cleaner and easier to have lots of links.
- The "Messages" indicator has moved from the right hand side of the navbar (Under User Tools) to the left (Under Home, News etc)
- Site Issues has been added to the Site Links dropdown
- Live Chat has been added to the Site Links dropdown
- New buttons have been added below the User Tools menu (where the old PM indicator used to be). These are dropdowns in and of themselves, linking to the other "main" sites that make up the MTSN (ModTheSimsNetwork).
All Navbar menus are now grabbed via AJAX, saving some bandwidth and load on the servers - No they aren't becuase Firefox is officially utterly stupid and doesn't do something simple.
I realise that some of the changes may be a little annoying (one extra click to get to New Posts, and the moving of the PM indicator), but hopefully you'll agree that it makes things cleaner.
Having the MTSN buttons in the top right (which are also on S2C and SXS2 and soon to be on the wiki when I can beat the stylesheets into submission), means that it's much easier to see what is available on the other sites, as I think a lot of people aren't neccesarily aware of the things on S2C, or on the Wiki. It ties the sites more closely into each other which is always a good thing.
I hope you like the changes - and have a great day.
Regards,
Delphy
PS Becuase of the type of changes performed, I have not added the option to "revert" back to the previous layout minus buttons. This is entirely deliberate right now. |
by Delphy,
12th Apr 2008 at
04:13 PM
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(52 comments)
(6172 views)
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Hi All,
You've all probably noticed how slow the site can get (especially recently) - this is due to a number of factors, specifically the turning off of the download caching (since it wasn't working as well as I wanted it to), as well as one of the servers dying and having to be rebuilt. A key factor in this is also the design of the actual download browsing pages themselves and how they are coded.
:here: [size=4][color=indigo]Download Browsing[/color][/size]
Today I have implemented a change to the way the pages (that is, the ones you see when you use the Download navbar drop down) are generated. In tests, this has shown a dramatic improvement in page speed and general browsing experience.
From now on, download pages will only return a maximum of 2000 threads, unless you select the "Show All Downloads" link at the bottom, in which case it will return all but obviously be a lot slower.
2000 hits is approximately 125 pages worth and, to be honest, how many trawl through 125 pages worth of downloads without filtering for specifics? Not many - but for those who really want to, I've retained the "Click here to see all" link at the bottom.
Another small change to these is in the way the Navbar Breadcrumbs gets generated for viewing a specific members downloads.
Previously if you wanted to view all my downloads, it would say Downloads -> Body Shop by Delphy. Now, it says Downloads -> Delphy -> BodyShop, which I think is more intuitive.
:here: [size=4][color=indigo]Edit Post[/color][/size]
I've also streamlined the Edit Post screen so that you no longer get the "Maxis Recolour / New Mesh / Mesh Recolour" box in forums that don't support them, nor do you get the Mesh List boxs for non recolours. A couple of other tweaks and other backend changes round out the changes here.
Thats it. Pretty minor, but hopefully should see a nice speed increase.
Regards
Delphy |
by Delphy,
2nd Apr 2008 at
04:30 PM
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(37 comments)
(10910 views)
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Hi All,
It appears one of the main www servers (hideki) had a drive failure today and is thus non-operational.
I have requested a new drive to be put in the machine and it be reloaded. No data will be lost, since it's just a www server anyway.
However, any links directly to hideki.modthesims2.com will not work. I have removed hideki from the main www and forums pools, but it may take up to 24 hours for the DNS to fully propogate. So you might see blank pages / server timeouts / site cannot be found issues for a few days.
This will mean that the existing www servers will be overloaded, and thus a lot slower than usual. Please be patient :)
I will update this thread with more information when I get it - usually the hosting company are fairly quick with building machines, so hopefully everything will be sorted out by the end of the week.
Regards
Delphy |
by Delphy,
26th Mar 2008 at
07:14 PM
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(27 comments)
(11952 views)
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