Spring 2026 Site Update - New Features, Improvements & More

Hello everyone,

I just want to say thank you for sticking with us through the biggest site update we’ve ever rolled out. Last year’s launch didn’t go as smoothly as we’d hoped and we know there have been some issues along the way, so we really appreciate your patience and feedback. It’s helped us get to a much stronger place moving forward.

Now that things have stabilised a bit, today we’re launching a bunch of new features and changes that we think you’re going to love.

Discovery: Tag Filters

The whole point of our tag system has always been discovery. You’ve been able to click into tags and explore everything connected to them, but proper filtering on category pages was missing.

That’s now changed.

You can now explore and filter by tags directly on category pages, with the system built to expand much further over time.

To start, we’ve added brand, country, and year filters to vehicle pages, along with a “Made with AI” filter on script pages.

You can now filter by Brand, Country and Year on Vehicle pages.

A small change on the surface, but a big step toward making discovery faster, cleaner, and far more useful across the platform.

Discovery: Site Wide Tag Exclusions

To give you even more control over what you see on LCPDFR.com, we’re introducing account-level, site-wide tag exclusions.

Any files matching the tags you choose to exclude will be hidden across the site — including the downloads portal, download feeds, trending and featured sections, and search results.

The tag filtering controls, now available in Account Settings. In this example, files tagged as outdated are being hidden.

The downloads category page, showing 1 active account tag filter and 34 files hidden as a result of excluding the outdated tag.

Whether you want to hide AI-generated work, certain vehicle types, specific countries, or even particular vehicle years, we hope this system helps you fully customize how you browse content on LCPDFR.com.

Note: We're aware of an issue of going to Account Settings, then navigating to Downloads Filters will not load the tag box correctly and we're working to fix it. Refreshing the page if the tag box doesn't load will workaround this for now.

Site Experience: Thanking Creators

As a thank you to our creators and contributors, we’ll be removing external advertisements for community members who are actively engaging with the community.

The exact criteria may evolve over time, as our community contributes in many different ways. Whether you're helping new members with questions, uploading mods, or simply being an active part of the site, we want to recognize and reward those contributions.

For creators who share their mods with the LCPDFR.com community, ads will be removed once you reach 1,000 verified unique downloads.

For all other members, ads will be removed once you achieve the Sergeant rank (1,000 community points). Our rank system awards points for a variety of community activity, including forum posts, gallery uploads, comments and reviews (+1), giving or receiving reputation (+1), gaining followers (+2), and more.

This change is going live today, though it may take some time after reaching the requirements for the benefit to be applied to your account. Logging in and out if you meet the criteria may help this apply sooner. We also plan to add a way for members to track their progress toward these thresholds in the future.

This is one small way we can give back to the creators and community members who help make the site what it is.

Developer: API

Our old API has started to show its age and wasn’t really built with the growth of the website in mind.

Historically, we’ve had to handle security on LCPDFR.com in some fairly unique ways. While we want to discourage automated traffic, serving an API directly from our main website domain meant we also had to keep certain protections less aggressive than we would’ve liked.

The API has been moved onto its own dedicated infrastructure, allowing us to properly monitor usage, apply separate security procedures, and relax some of the harsher caching behaviour that existed previously.

We’ve also adopted the more standard approach of enforcing API keys across the new API. This allows us to better track usage, apply limits where necessary, and manage access more effectively. API keys are issued in line with our new API Guidelines, which outline acceptable usage and restrictions around commercial use.

There are currently two key types available:

• Version Check Keys — designed for embedding into your own plugins, primarily for update and version checking.

• Full API Keys — provide broader access to the API, including mass file listings, extended file metadata (such as tags), .NET assembly data, and more.

Full API keys require approval. We may contact you with questions about your intended usage. Both full and limited API keys require an active LCPDFR.com account that has been active for at least one week.

You can request API keys in your Account Settings.

You can see usage limits, documentation and regenerate your key from Account Settings.

With the new downloads listing API, you can list up to 10,000 files at once. Full documentation available in Account Settings with an issued key.

Overall, this new API infrastructure gives us a far more scalable and maintainable foundation moving forward. Separating the API from the main website allows us to improve security, reliability, and performance without impacting the experience of regular community members on LCPDFR.com.

We’ll be deprecating the old API in stages.

Effective today, the old version check API endpoint (checkForUpdates) will no longer be available for newly submitted files. All remaining endpoints, apart from checkForUpdates, will be turned off on 1 June.

We understand that deprecating checkForUpdates may cause issues for some plugins. We plan to phase this out later this year in stages and with planned brownouts and will share more details in the API forum closer to the time.

We’re not stopping there, either.

While these updates are a big step forward for discovery, customization, and the overall site experience, we already know where we want to focus next, on search.

The truth is, we’ve largely outgrown the search system our current software provides. It was never really built for our mod heavy platform with this much content, this many tags, and the kind of discovery features we now want to support properly.

Because of that, search is probably going to involve a lot more custom work from us moving forward. Better relevance, smarter filtering with the new options announced above, and a generally cleaner experience are all things we want to improve over time.

As always, we do appreciate your feedback. We try to guide LCPDFR.com based on what the community wants, alongside the areas where we feel we can improve and do better ourselves.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone use these new features, and we’re excited to keep improving the platform alongside the community that makes it what it is.

Cyan.