1. Any changes made to the base game.

2. There are a variety of places. ZombieRus5 has a nice list.

3. There are various types. Total Conversions and Enhancements are the mainlines with various subcategories. What are good depends on what you are looking for.

4. Downloading is like any other downloading. Placement involves going to the mod menu in Sins and pushing the show mod path. This creates the path and shows you where to place the mod. After you place the mod, go back and activate it. myfist0 has some nice threads explaining things.

5. No

6. You do need to know what version of the game you are playing as each version has its own mod style. Both version (1.04) and type (Rebellion) are important.

Mods vary greatly in what they can do....some do very little, such as simply removing superweapons....some do a lot, completly changing all graphics (including the UI), effects, strings, factions, music, sounds, etc...

The best way to get a mod is to find its associated thread on the modding section of the forums...each mod team (or individual) has their own way of making the mod available to others...I am not aware of any Sins mod every having the issue of giving people viruses and what not....

"Good" is relative...if you are a diehard fan of Star Trek, then a Star Trek conversion mod may be the best thing in the world even if it isn't balanced or polished....conversely, even the slightest problems in a Star Wars conversion mod may irk you if you really don't have a thing for Star Wars..."Good" is also subjective...Volt's "Rebalanced Races" may appear absolutely awesome or absolutely pathetic depending on your perception of what makes for good balance...

I suggest you look at Zombie's list of mods...it will provide links to the threads/pages associated with each mod...it will also indicate which mods are for Rebellion and which ones are for Trinity....note that some mod teams are still in the process of converting from trinity to rebellion...this thread by Sinperium should help you learn how to mod and/or properly "install" mods (which by no means permanently affect your Sins Installation)...finally, this thread by GoaFan will help you utilize the dev.exe, which can be a quick way of seeing all the new content of a mod...

Seleuceia, do any of those links provide intel about how to move a mode from the downloads menu to the mods menu in the game.  I understand about showing mod path.  But what do I click and stuff?

How do I move it, though?

You're going to be downloading mods as compressed files like .zip or .7z. You'll need to either extract them directly to your mod folder or cut and paste the zipped file to the mod folder and extract there. The game sees mods as individual folders in the mod folder.

Once you have the mod extracted like in that picture, go in game and you should see the mod listed on the left in the mods section of the main menu. Select that mod, hit enable mod, and then apply changes. Note any mod that adds content, rather than just changing music and textures (which is almost all of them) will have a checksum that is not zero. If your checksum is zero, your extraction program probably made an extra folder when extracting the mod.

Cut the file you download and paste it into your mod folder, then extract?

I really need a step by step walkthrough of how to do this.

I did that, but What do I do with that information?  All this is meaningless.  I have no knowledge of any of this, at all.

How do I put the mod into the folder? 

Also, I don't think the mod neede unzipping, because 7-zip would only let me compress it, so I assume I was automaticlly unzipped?

I finally moved it into the mod menu in the game.  I can now use it. 

Thank you all for your support, especially Ryat and GoaFan.

+1 karma for both of you.

Probably an issue with your folder nesting...for example, there is the Mods v1.04 folder, and within that should be a folder "Mod A" and "Mod B"...within those folders should immediately be the mod assets (folders with names GameInfo, Galaxy, Windows, etc)...if there is a second level of folders (folder "Mod A" within a folder "Mod A") then the game won't see the mod's assets...

It is also possible the mod assets weren't unzipped...the game can only read extracted files...

I couldn't find a folder called "The Mod"  and I saw no duplicates.

No, the order is fine.