If you want a TLDR, here is the timeline and reasoning behind shutting down the site:
- Timeline: Hosting is already paid and covered for the year, so the site will remain online until 9/7/2026 to allow people to download their mods and rehome them. I will maintain the site’s download functions for the next year, but will likely not restore the upload page. A download link to a batch file of all mods hosted directly on the site is listed here and a torrent with the backup to former modulous files is here.
- Reasoning: Bloated backend and data storage making it harder to maintain the site smoothly without dedicating more time and effort or money than I am able to give at this point in my life. There are a lot of people more ingrained in the scene that are better equipped to put this type of resource together than I am at this point.
SSBMTextures was launched on Sep 1, 2020, during the height of the pandemic and when the previous host for melee mods, Modulous, finally went dark. At the time, I was fairly active in the scene, and on Smashboards, and still in my mid 20’s, so creating the site and managing it without monetizing it felt like a way to give back to a scene that introduced me to a lot of great people and taught me a lot of skills I would have otherwise not engaged with.
Over the passed 6 years, nearly half a million people have visited the site and upload nearly 70gbs of mod files, not including any of the files still hosted in Google Drive, from nearly every country on earth.
Now is probably a good time to mention that I am writer by trade, not a web designer or programmer. Most of the time when an issue occurs on the site, I am scrambling to figure out where and when things went wrong or reaching out to friends in the field to ask for advice, especially since I am rarely actively making changes to the site unprompted.
This became a noticeable issue to me in 2023, and crossed the line into a noticeable issue for users in 2024. It’s weird to say, but most of that comes from good problems, like increased traffic and usage, and the realization of personal goals outside of Melee. Despite the trend of my movement away from the scene and the site’s continued growth, technical issues were largely manageable until August 2025 when the upload form started failing for harder to determine reasons. I was able to correct this once by essentially rebuilding the form from the ground up, but the issue persisted in early August and remains unsolved.
So – what happens now? I feel like I need to make a call, to either crap or get of the pot, as it were. When I look at the site and what it does, I am proud of what it was able to be for 6 years, but realistically there are many better suited people in this scene that are more familiar with the ins and outs of managing a site with user-submitted content and are more invested in the current state of Melee than I am. My hope is that someone will fill the gap in the same way that this site filled the gap left behind by Modulous to support the wealth of creative modders in this community – or that a more generalized host can fill that gap while Discord and other online spaces can provide some level of community for people creating.
Hosting is already paid and covered for the year, so the site will remain online until 9/7/2026 to allow people to download their mods and rehome them. I will maintain the site’s download functions for the next year, but will likely not restore the upload page. A download link to a batch file of all mods hosted directly on the site is listed here and a torrent with the backup to former Modulous files is here.
If you plan on designing or already host an alternative to this site and are interested in taking over the URL for SSBMTextures, contact me via the Contact Us page.
Thanks!
SuperCresAtBest