I have previously written about vandalism on Wikipedia when I was constructing Wikipedia Vandalism Watch. After continued watching and reverting on Wikipedia I started to notice trends in the vandalism, and that most malicious edits almost always included certain phrases and symbols. Some of these are hard to separate out from real edits, and others are not. The most used and easiest to detect phrase is the good old “!!!!!”. So I toyed with the idea of incorporating some sort of Recent Changes RSS feed reader, and then adding in some text checks, but with Wikipedia Vandalism Watch being a read only client, i.e. just shows you edits from flagged users I didn’t think this to be much use. So instead I went about creating a new application, this time an unattended robot to scan for, and automatically remove vandalism.

Admittedly this sounded much easier than it actually is when I started, with various hurdles getting in the way, one example of which is the Wikipedia token editing. Which means you can’t just send a POST request to the server to edit an article. Once things like that had been solved things slowly fell into place. About half way through development I started the Request for Approval process. This is done by the Bot Approvals Group, as this allows them to regulate the standard that bots are made to before you are allowed to run them on Wikipedia. But of course, I can see you asking already, “it’s Wikipedia, and public web-site, how could they stop me?”. Well the simple answer to that one is that if a bot is spotted without being approved, the bot, and your account will be banned straight away. Bots without approval are not welcome on Wikipedia in any shape or form, as unless its been approved it could at any moment go off the rails and destroy many articles before someone could either turn it off or ban it. It’s also the ruling with approved bots that if your bot does the same thing, the owner is responsible and he or she should clean up the mess.

After some discussions with some members of the Bot Approvals Group of how the bot worked, and how it detected vandalism I was granted a trial of 50 edits in the main name space. This trial was completed quite slowly due to the restrictions that were applied to my bot, of 2 edits per minute for 40 reverts, then for the last 10 reverts, I could let it run as fast as it could find vandalism. After a few false positives along the way, and some conflicts, the trial was completed.

At the time of writing, the bot has completed the trial and is currently awaiting news and information on how to proceed. If you want some more technical information, or just to see what the bot is currently up to, check out its User page on Wikipedia.

Well it’s that time o’ year again, so just a quick post t’ tell everyone its talk like a pirate day! YARR! I’ll be spendin’ most o’ me day codin’ away in t’ bilges o’ t’devotii ship, toss me a grog if you could be so kind!

T’ get more information on t’ day, here be t’official site! Avast me hearties!

Well, I seemed to miss this in the news while I was away at the weekend at Alton Towers. Needless to say, the second I saw this available for download I jumped on it. Contained within the zip file are 20 mp3 files, (so no longer the ogg format that Unreal Tournament 2004 used), but not all are music files, some are announcer sound previews. It appears that they have taken the announcer voice and added a slight reverb effect which adds to the surround sound effect.

Track Listing:

1. UT2007 MenuTheme (3:40)
2. ONS01Mix (4:20)
3. Announcer Male KillingSpree (0:02)
4. Mech8Mix (3:32)
5. Announcer Female PrepareForBattle (0:01)
6. GoDown Mix (3:06)
7. RomNecris02 BeatMix (1:24)
8. Taunts Malcolm AhHellNo (0:01)
9. UT2007 MenuTheme2 (2:52)
10. RomUT02Mix (4:00)
11. Announcer Male DoubleKill (0:02)
12. RomNecris01 AmbientTheme (2:12)
13. GoDown SuspenseTheme (1:11)
14. RomNecris02 VictoryTheme (1:48)
15. LockdownMix (4:48)
16. RomNecris01 VictoryTheme (1:12)
17. Announcer Female NewOpponent (0:02)
18. Outpost SuspenseTheme (1:27)
19. RomUT06 ActionTheme (0:50)
20. SpaceDnB VictoryTheme (1:00)

After listening to the first few tracks I can tell you now that Epic Games have defiantly gone back to their original Unreal Tournament roots, as the menu theme is a remixed original menu theme. Within the second menu theme there is a fantastic bass line which I think my neighbours will learn to like.

Throughout this soundtrack though there are other remixes of the old music, such as “Go Down” and “Mech8″ which sound amazing and all I now want to do is play the original and salivate in waiting of Unreal Tournament 3.

Download Link – Unreal Tournament 3 Official Soundtrack (34mb)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of days you will have heard about the strike action that the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT) are currently conducting over the Underground in London.

Tube staff walked off the job around 6pm yesterday and will be putting their feet up for 3 days until 6pm on Thursday. If their “issues” and “complaints” aren’t sorted by this coming Monday then the same thing is going to happen all over again! So obviously they aren’t content in causing havoc for millions of people for a nearly a full week, they threaten to do it twice.

Anyway, to see the impact of this strike just ask anyone who works in London. I have heard lots of stories this morning of people being unable to get to work due to bus’s being overloaded or simply just not being able to cope with the sheer number of people needing them.

Needless to say, ranting about this sort of thing won’t make it stop, and it won’t stop RMT (and all the other unions) abusing the privilege of striking and using it more as a bargaining chip than a last resort. Over the pond in USA they have something called the Railway Labor Act, which basically boils down to their Rail and Airline staff not being allowed to use strike action unless it is the last resort. So it’s something that may help (well, you never know! )

10 Downing Street Petition: Ban London Underground workers from engaging in strike action.

Overall though, the meaning of striking I think has been lost over time. When we look back at when striking first popping up it was due to various serious issues over working conditions and how people were treated. When we look at it now its over stupid and silly reasons that should never ever end up in strike action.

If you are on Facebook, there’s a lovely group regarding these strikes, and you can find it here!

We have all seen the majority of different ways of displaying feedback to users via Ajax calls, however one I hadn’t seen before caught my eye today. Instead of hijacking the entire screen, or creating new sections or areas on the screen and causing movement, this does a modal dialog type effect… just without the dialog part.

You can see some examples here and here. This is certainly a nicer and softer way of displaying progress as no extra space is used up with the effect. Better still, this has a Ruby on Rails helper already made!

If you were at i31, you would have heard about Kwari but you might not know what it was as the PR team that attended the event didn’t actually explain. Kwari is another company cashing in on the idea of playing FPS games for money, except its slightly different. Instead of piggy backing off existing games like Counter Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, they have created their own for their deathmatch playground.

Instead of paying an amount to have access to servers, or paying per match, you simply pay for the bullets you use…

“Every time you hit another player in Kwari you make money. Every time you are hit by another player it costs you. Every shot counts. How much is down to the stake level you play in. But this is not the only way to win.

Doing damage to yourself, breaking crates, use of certain map features or picking up additional weapons, pickups and health packs may have a fractional cost attached. This cost is transferred between a series of jackpots, prizes and awards available in the game, all of which can be won by any player, regardless of the skill or stake level of game they prefer to play.”

Now this sounds like quite a reasonable way to do things, as they created the game they can change whatever they like, all the way from gun accuracy to level changes whenever they please. However this also has its downsides, as the game will never come close to being played and balanced as much as something like CS:S. How much tweaking will be required so that the game is “fair” and “balanced”? Unfortunately though something they can’t control are the players skill levels, and from first impressions there doesn’t appear to be any seeding information in their initial posts about it all that I could find. It would probably be suicide to launch the game without seeding, as all it takes is one skilled player to ruin the experience for everyone else.

“At no point does the house take any of this cash – if you win it, it’s yours. You can get your winnings back to your real bank balance easily and quickly.

The game is free to download, you’ll need ammunition and this is the only place Kwari charges for anything. Think of us as your virtual arms dealer – we supply you with ammo (which works in all weapons) for a fixed cost. Depending on your style of play the amount of ammo you need will vary.”

I guess that the company behind Kwari will primarily make their money from wasted ammunition, and secondly by placed advertisements on their websites and within the game itself. Let’s hope its not too “pushed” to the user. Alternatively, if advertising is even going to be used, it will no doubt spark the whole BF2 In-game advertising saga again.

With the game being so heavily based on hitting your opponents and not wasting your ammunition, what happens with regard to lag… packet loss.. and bullet recognition. This game is being built, from what information is available, on a completely new engine, lets hope they get it right, or at least have the coding skill and knowledge to fix it when the first play test online shows just how bad it really is. A post has appeared for this topic, and is awaiting a reply from the development team.

To wrap up, possibly the most important issue that the team have generated for themselves with creating their own game, is of course, cheating. Not using existing games with tested, experienced and mature anti-cheat systems (Warden, VAC, Punkbuster, etc) will only generate a buggy, light and easily defeated anti-cheat system. They either best have a programming genius working on their anti-cheat, have snapped up someone from EA (where a number of Kwari employees have come from), or thirdly and finally, haven’t gotten that far into development and subsequently will bodge something out when that time comes. A post has also appeared on the Kwari forums regarding this topic, and as of today, is also still waiting for a reply from the development team.

It seems that the team behind this project have a lot of work on their hands, not only to produce a FPS game to the current high standard that gamers expect, but also anti-cheat software, an entire money system, an integrated payment system. All that while still managing to make it all work together without any issue.

Good luck to the team behind it, as your going to need it!