1) Check out Keen_Guide commands section and do a find for seta.

That should explain to you when you should use the set and seta

PuFF is right on *waves* Hey PuFF.... I may be up for some Flatout
soon. Surgery on the 28th of this month.

3) just have them put the IP. Simple as that.

The values in the config files can be set by two different methods. They are "set" and "seta". The command is followed by a variable name and then the value associated with that name, usually enclosed in double quotes (example: seta name "WarMonger"). Q3 logic looks up these names when need and gets the values associated with them. There is a very important difference between "set" and "seta" that, if not used correctly, can seemingly corrupt you config files.

As a rule, it is always a good idea to keep a backup of your config files before making any major changes, just in case.

Values set using the "seta" command are automatically written out to the config file the second they are changed ("seta" means 'set archive'). If you look in the q3config.cfg file generated by Q3 you will notice that they are all set using the "seta" command.

Values set using the "set" command are effective only for the current session of the game. They are not auto archived. Any changes that you want to make permanent, you would manually have to edit the config file with any plain text editor and re-save.

This begs the question--why not use "seta" for everything and make it easy. The problem is that using "seta" will auto archive the values only to the q3config.cfg file. Although you may have multiple config files, the changes made to variables using "seta" will be saved only to q3config.cfg. However, there is a limit to how big a config file may be. The config file is read all at once by the Q3 engine and if this limit is exceeded, Q3 will automatically switch to default settings for everything.

By using "seta" for every possible variable, especially for Coliseum2, you will quickly exceed this limit. Also, Coliseum2 added additional client side variables that are, by their intended design, auto archived (rail type, weapon hand, announcer sounds, hook bind key, etc.). Careful testing was done to make sure that the additional auto archived variables along with the ones created by Q3 will not exceed the allowable limit.

However, even if a variable was set using "set" in a config file, the user may override this by bringing down the console and change that variable by using "seta". This will cause that variable to be written out to q3config.cfg. Be careful not to do this since you may inadvertently cause q3config.cfg to exceed the file limit. No matter how the variable was originally set, using "seta" in the console will cause it to write to q3config.cfg.