Other than the points above, here are a few more technical ones.

1. I purchased 2 of the WVC54G cameras, one was defective right out of the box, I had to replace it. This tells me something about Linksys factory quality control.

2. There is no way for a regular user to view it over the internet following the manual. The firmware must be upgraded. I Did, but for others it would be a challenge due to inconsistencies on Linksys website, even if they knew how to do it.

3. In utility you cannot edit motion detection settings, you must delete it first, then enter all over again. Top of the stupidity if you ask me.

4. Built in motion detection – even if you make it work is useless will not send more than 5 seconds of motion.

5. Wireless is the worst of any wireless device i’ve ever tried. Both of my cameras behave identical, so it is not a defective unit, it is the way they work: if the power is lost and then restored or if the router turned off and then on – the cameras do not reconnect automatically. I have to turn them off then on to reconnect to the wireless router. So if you leave your home and router restarts – forget it, before you come home you are not gonna have the cameras to do their job!

6. What is about downloading recording utility from Linksys web site? It is not there! Nowhere! Does not exist! Well, after research i found out that it was just misleading and it is there but hidden in another package that is called drivers or something, but i had to waste a lot of time to find it out. If you simply read what they say – you are out of luck.

7. It is not fit for the purpose in one more way – the recording cannot be done by the software running as a service. It means that you must be logged in for it to work. So if your computer has password on the login and it was restarted while you are away – you are out of luck – the recording will not work until you come back and log in. You must babysit your camera, it is not suitable for unattended use. Then who needs it?

8. When connected wirelessly it constantly disconnects (and as mentioned above never auto-reconnects)

9. When the light stops blinking it means the camera is connected, right? Wrong! The setup often does not find the camera even when the light is steady on. Either misleading or not working. Again, tested on both cameras so it cannot be my imagination or just one defective unit.

10. If you have more than one camera and want to define where to record motion you have to be brighter than those who made that interface. It is organized the least logical way for me. Also the setting for how much disk space to allocate for the recording – you cannot just have all the space allocated for motion detection – the utility just gives you an error message. You have to specify at least something for still pictures, even if you do not need them. Again, you cannot expect to just follow the manual thinking it may work for you, you have to be very creative to make this WVC54G work.

Vlad Mayzel
604-GET-HELP On-Site Computer Services

1.) Manually check any post that contains a link or an image or matches a list of keywords.
2.) Force a user to verify an email address before they can post for the first time.
3.) Image verification on each posting.
4.) Manually check anything coming from an IP outside of a list of “good” countries.

That should cut out most of the cruft and require minimal moderation.

It’s a personal taste thing, and I’m *very* fussy.

The boobies sound entertaining though, I shall go play.

I keep MegaIRC on a USB drive for emergency Windows IRCing. It’s fairly feature complete, I connect to irssi proxy from it, and it’s ugly as sin. It’s main compelling feature, though, is that the icon is a pair of pixel-art boobies.

Webadmin is working – and working very well! elbonio is doing the dev for that seperately to the main ut3 code, which means faster fixes. As an example, I reported a bug whereby several players shared the same playerid – which is a value that the webadmin (and internal admin) decides who to apply your actions on when you click kick or ban. On a 32 player server I’ve seen five people sharing the same playerid – meaning if you kicked or banned one, you’d take out either a random one of those five, or all of them. Not very fair!

So I reported it – elbonio understood patched and released a new one within a day, despite the bug being core to ut3′s seamless travel system (which lets it load maps without restarting). That bug is still there, but webadmin lets us work around it easily.

That also means I’ve been able to successfuly develop perl routines to interact with the webadmin and issue remote kick/ban commands from the command line or irc, or see from either of those who’s playing, including their ip, profile id or keyhash. There’s also a good irc reporter bot working, and the author – zanmat0 – has kindly included the technical stuff we needed.

So finally, the GSP I work for has the ability to actually do some adminning on these servers. We can finally ban those who cheat, lame or use racist or abusive chat.

UT3 as a player experience is slowly improving – it’s just a shame that the first people who played it got pissed off with the bugs and cheating that a good percentage seem to have left for good. It’s now five months since UT3 went gold, a good four months before there was any way to admin more than a server at a time.

Epic have always prided themselves on their mission statement “It’ll be released when it’s ready.” Well, ut3 was not, not by a long way.

I’ve just installed my first ut3 map.

It took ten minutes and help.

Unlike previous versions, the maps aren’t stored in the program directory. (Although for some reason, that does contain two copies of the same maps)

Instead, I had to install it here:

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Published\CookedPC\CustomMaps

None of the directories below UTGame existed, I had to create them.

When I did, I was forced to restart UT3 before it found the new map. (Other versions searched on the fly)

It took ten minutes and I had help from the map builder. What chance would the average punter have? None.

And what’s worse – the UT package manager – UMOD – has been ditched, so there is NO alternative to get an offline map than performing these ridiculous steps.

These insane problems and frustrations are making me hate UT3. At this stage I should be in love with this game but I’m not, and these issues will ultimately affect the longevity of the game and severely hurt Epic’s reputation.

Nobody can write an irc reporter bot yet (neccessary for multi-adminning) because UT3′s uscript doesn’t allow connections.

The only way to ban somebody is to block their IP at your router. UT3 has NO effective way of banning anyone.

No anti-cheat has been announced. Nobody seems to know what form this will take.

People in the know are blaming Midway for forcing epic to release a game that’s months short of release quality. It’s nothing new that games are rushed out before ready, but the scale of the shortcomings in UT3 are truly massive. If that’s true, shame on Midway for forcing a premature release and shame on Epic for agreeing to it.

This game is not of release quality. Even if Epic work really hard and code their asses off it won’t be for weeks.

It does fix some of the issues, but many more are left untouched. rcon still doesn’t work. Using any admin commands via the game console works, but switch the server into LAN mode and it’ll disappear off the internet immediately.

No sign of webadmin returned.

The menus are still awful.

So still there is no way to admin a UT3 server.

For a game whose webadmin has been critically aclaimed by users and admins for eight years, and held up as an example of how to do it to other game companies – to drop it and then break every other admin tool is frankly amazing. Epic – what the hell are you playing at?