Project:About

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About Step Modifications

We are a nonprofit providing a community-maintained website hosting forums to facilitate topic-based discussions and a wiki with game-modification guides, modding-tool guides and a wealth of additional modding resources as well as community-generated content. Many wiki articles link to corresponding forum topics for discussion rather than relying on the built-in wiki 'Talk' pages, which can still be used. Additionally, our services are provided to everyone free of charge and without ANY advertizing. As such, we rely on community contributions to help maintain content,

* The Skyrim Total Enhancement Project (aka, 'STEP') is now a nonprofit corporation under the official name of "Step Modifications". Step Modifications is still validly referred to officially as "STEP", but this title is no longer intended to represent "Skyrim Total Enhancement Project", because STEP now supports more than just Skyrim.

First and foremost, STEP represents a "modding methodology". It began with TheCompiler as a PDF guide on the Nexus and has since been presented in the form of guide with a wiki and forum structure wrapped around it. STEP has historically been updated in fits and spurts, with active development on the mod list, mod testing, version releases, etc., followed by long periods of seeming inactivity. However, behind the scenes, the STEP staff are hardly inactive. We have been focused on site and content development to support the STEP Guide/forum structures and some challenges in maintenance. Most notably, forums maintenance is a lot of work that cannot be put off (otherwise, things fall into disarray ... this is how forum communities are, although ours is more mature than most). Wiki development and the learning curve associated with using our wiki are also challenges for many members. For our staff, the challenge is refining the interface to maximize user friendliness. Consider that the vast majority of all of this work has been accomplished and maintained by a small handful of people. Granted, we had several others on board in the beginning and continue to get much-needed support from some key individuals --without whom, we would never have made it this far. As a result, the STEP Guide updates and our attention to modding and mod testing largely took a back seat to site and community development. One way that we sought to mitigate the ever-mounting problem of maintenance overhead was to define a rather strict STEP Mandate. This helped us to weed out a big chunk of mods (and the work that comes with adding, updating and maintaining them over various guide versions) so that we could focus more on infrastructure and communications. Unfortunately, the Mandate has also been a bit of a hindrance for people that want the STEP mod list to expand. Over the course of our struggle to maintain the STEP "engine", others have expressed a desire to simply get on with modding Skyrim (remember, the reason that we are all here in the first place?). Thus arose from the turmoil STEP-independent modding guide authors like, Neovalen and his "Skyrim Revisited" and DarkLexyLady and her "Legacy of the Dragonborn" as well as some Fallout and Oblivion modding guides to quench the appetite of the masses who expected STEP to evolve beyond a basic guide and into the "dream build" that we all had envisioned it would be. In a way, the work of these independent guide authors and STEP's hosting platform have kept the interest of some of our most senior community members. We always have new members and users that are interested in STEP as a rather prominent starting point for beginning modders, but some of the more advanced modders --who have patiently waited for STEP to evolve along with them-- may have grown somewhat disillusioned and --luckily for us-- have found solace in these independent modding guides.

The Advent of Step 3.0

In the midst of all of this uncertainty, the STEP team decided to enhance but simplify our own guide creation and update methods while facilitating guide contributions of independent mod authors. On top of that, we wanted to extend our infrastructure to support additional games much like the Nexus has done over the last decade. This allowed us to begin work on our revised modding-guide infrastructure and website, which we have branded "STEP 3.0." Due to our latest guides having been v2.x.x, STEP 3.0 is our 'reboot' of the project into its next phase, including a new website powered by custom guide-building software and updated forums. In October, 2018, the "STEP "1.0" website went down due to a server issue that was never identified or resolved. This resulted in the site being completely down for the better part of two weeks, which left a lot of our members and visitors in a lurch while we moved to a new host with better servers and completely rebuilt the server/software infrastructure (unofficially, we claim the current state of STEP as "STEP 2.0"). This emphasized our need to ramp up development of our new service model and website, as well as, implement fail-safe server redundancies and devops pipelines.