Branson... there is a special kind of hell...

This is an advert form Virgin media, read it, wallow in its message, understand its nuances, after all the person who came up with that advert probably got an obscene amount of money doing so and I like to feel like I'm getting my money's worth!

Could it be? Is this really another post complaining about Virgin media's bizarre nuances? Yes it is my dear readers, yes it is.

Its fair to say I've had issues with them in the past, from random disconnects during WoW to the upload rates being comparable to the Sluggian Olympic game's 500 meter dash. This time however there isn't an issue with speed, or an issue with the fact that after uploading more than about a gigabyte the connection gets cut down to a fifth of its speed!

Today We merely have an issue of virgins media's somewhat refined pallet, see there are certain websites that virgin media doesn't like. Perhaps from the name Virgin you might suspect it would prevent you from looking at raunchy websites, well that doesn't appear to be the case. Virgin doesn't like you going onto perfectly legitimate websites, in some kind of bizarre perversion of the word it seems to compel you away from decent websites until the time comes when you can no-longer visit the www. but instead are limited to the xxx.

To be more precise, I was trying to sign up to Dungeons and dragons online, its just gone free to play and I like the sound of that, certainly it has the right price tag, so I figure its worth a shot. What should have been a simple process of filling out a form (and indeed it was a simple form compared to some sign-up sites) was turned into some kind of complex loop by virgin.

Shall I just say it here? As of writing this: "you can't sign up for free-to-play DDO using a virgin media Internet connection". That's right, it comes up saying you entered an error on the form and then won't let you retry until you delete your cookies. Deleting your cookies lets you try again whereupon you'll get the same old error message.

So how did I resolve this? Well the good old fashioned way! I took my laptop and walked around the house refreshing for wireless connections, having no luck I then wandered around the garden. Still having no-luck I walked towards the front garden and then it appeared! An unprotected wireless network with a consistent connection (insert angelic fanfare here). Using that connection I signed up to DDO and then began the download, and good news the download does work on virgin media!

So in conclusion I highly recommend DDO to anyone on Virgin media, it will provide you hours of entertainment before you even play the game!