BrainKing Knowledge Base

The midnight (and 5 minutes) is an important breakpoint in the membership lifetime because it is the time of a check whether the membership has expired or not. Since it is a critical action which must be absolutely fail-safe, it only sends me a notification and the actual terminations of expired memberships are still performed manually. On the other hand, this process was working correctly for several years, so the time has come to make it automatic. Although the automatization of processing expired memberships is not launched yet, it will probably happen soon and when it is done, the requests "please give me 5 more days and don't turn me back to a Brain Pawn, my payment will be delayed a little" will stop working.

If your membership is about to expire and you want to renew it, please make sure you do it in advance, not during the very last day. It is safer.

Although this issue does not belong to the most frequent questions, it occasionally appears in my message box, so it would be better to clarify it once and forever. This short article is about upgrading a BrainKing membership from Brain Knight to Brain Rook. The problem and its solution can be summarized into two main points:

• Question: I have accidentally purchased a Brain Knight membership today and I would want a Brain Rook level instead. What can I do?
• Answer: Since your membership has started today or several days ago, you can easily upgrade it by paying the difference between Brain Knight and Brain Rook fee, depending on the subscribed period. For example, if you have paid for one year Brain Knight (20 Euro) and the corresponding Brain Rook level is for 30 Euro, you must send another payment of 10 Euro (30-20) to complete the upgrade. The easiest way to do it is to use the Donation form on the Support Us page to specify the required amount. Yes, I know the form does not support all payment methods at the moment, but it will be fixed soon.
• Question: I paid for a Brain Knight membership 7 months ago and I would like to upgrade to a Brain Rook now. How can I do that? If I pay the full prize of Brain Rook, what would happen to the remaining 5 months of my current membership?
• Answer: This situation can be solved only by purchasing a normal Brain Rook membership which would start immediately after the payment. And since we don't want you to lose the already spent money, the rest of the current Brain Knight membership would be used to extend the new one (after some conversions are made). For example, if you purchase a year Brain Rook membership and you still have 5 months of Brain Knight level to use, it will be (approximately) converted to 2 extra months of the new Brain Rook membership. The result is, your current Brain Knight level will be cancelled but you receive 14 months of the new Brain Rook level, instead of 12.

Starting today, every new tournament has its own discussion board which is created after the tournament is started. Although all users can read the content of the discussion board, only the particular tournament players can submit their posts. There is a new link Discussion at every tournament page, just above the section tables, which points to the tournament discussion board, and the number of total and new posts is displayed next to it.

Although this feature does not cause a breakthrough, maybe some users will find it handy. There is an open issue whether to close such discussion board its tournament is finished or not, but at this moment there is no special rule applied - the board simply remains as it is.

By the way, a small addition of the move and go to the next game of this type and player has been implemented yesterday because there are people who claimed it was absolutely necessary to add.

The Feature Requests discussion board and my message box are full of requests to add new games or variants to BrainKing. I support it, BrainKing is mostly a game site and I want to implement as many different and interesting games as possible.
The most usual questions which emerge after posting a request of this kind are:

• What are your priorities of implementing the list of requested games? Are some games more important than others and will be added sooner?
• What game type are you currently working at?

All right, the answers follow:

• There are no priorities, I take all game requests equally important. Mostly because we have several communities which prefer their favourite game - backgammon fans want more backgammon variants, chess enthusiasts recommend interesting articles from the ChessVariants.org site, checkers players are waiting for international checkers and many national variants of this game, etc. Not to mention new games which are not implemented on BrainKing yet. It is not possible to do everything at once (and BrainKing maintenance requires to do many other tasks) but, as I already mentioned, all feature requests are noted and will be considered.
• The current game task which blocks all other ones is to fix the checkers model because it causes a small bug at Turkish Checkers and other checkers variants cannot be added until this issue is resolved. Fortunatelly, it is not a big problem and when I am back from holidays, the things will move faster.

Today, let me post a short note about the feature requests. The ones who were with us since the very beginning of BrainKing probably remember my almost instant reaction to all posts to the Feature Requests discussion board. Yes, it was easy 4 years ago because there was only a small community of active users. However, BrainKing was growing and still is, which means that the number of feature requests is growing as well and it is virtually impossible to handle all of them immediately.
The question is, is it still meaningful to post new requests to that board?
And the answer is YES! Of course. The only thing that changed was the form of my reaction. Basically, there are three cases:

• A request is very easy to implement, usually by changing several lines in the source code, and the work is done within one hour. Then the request is addressed instantly.
• A more advanced feature is asked to be done. Then, if no reaction from my side comes, it simply means I am thinking about it and I am not sure about the complexity of the task yet. Anyway, all such requests are noted and when the time comes, they are considered to be done or not.
• A too difficult or unworkable feature is requested. Then, usually, my short answer "it cannot be done" appears and the subject is closed.

The conclusion: Keep posting your requests and don't feel insulted if no response appears. No response is also a kind of response and means that I am aware of it, currently being occupied with other things.

Last week I have implemented several minor improvements to the site and since they were not worth announcing at the official Server News, I can describe them here (feel free to post comments about this subject):

• The Discussion Boards contains a list of Today's top visited boards. This table displays the board names sorted by a number of unique users who visited the particular board today. The list consists of both public and private boards, so it gives a picture of a popularity of fellowships as well.
• There is a new option at the Move and go to form which appears when you want to submit a new move in a game, and the option is go to the next game of similar type. How does it work? When you use this choice, BrainKing submits your move and then display the next game of the same game group. For example, if you make a move at a backgammon game and it is your turn at a hyper backgammon game too (it belongs to the same backgammon group), the system will show this game as the next one. It can be useful if you play several hundreds games but you want to finish, say, all chess variants first. The list of game groups can be found at the top of the New Game page.
• There are games where the result of a move is not shown before the move is actually submitted. For example, if you play battleboats and shoot on a selected square, you don't know if you hit or miss until you click on the "Move" button. That's why many users switch to the "Move and stay here" option to see the result instead of going to the next game. However, there is a drawback - in order to play another game, you must go back to the Main Page and select the game from the list. Fortunatelly, there is a small improvement now - if you stay on a game page where it is not your turn to move, BrainKing automatically scans your other games and if it finds another game of the same type, it will add a link Play the next game of *game type*.

I am aware of several BrainKing users who has problem accessing our site when using the Google Web Accelerator. This is a short description of disabling that tool for BrainKing:

1. Click on speedometer icon in the google web accelerator toolbar.
2. Select preferences from the drop down menu.
3. At the bottom of the page that drops down is a memo box labeled "Don't Accelerate These Sites" type "brainking.com" into this box.

BrainKing is a web site, accessed through a web browser, that means it occassionally faces the common browser problems at the client's side. If you think BrainKing is not working properly for you (some images don't load, only a part of a page is displayed, the site is slower than usual), try to clear your browser's cache (where it stores previously loaded pages and images to reuse them later):

• Firefox: Tools / Options / Cache / Clear Cache Now
• Internet Explorer: Tools / Internet Options / Temporary Internet Files / Delete Files
• Opera: Tools / Preferences / Advanced / History / Disk Cache / Empty Now
• WebTV: Clearing cache with WebTV is very easy. Simply power off the unit completely and turn it back on. (Using the "Hang Up" option is NOT enough. The "Power" button must be used. Sometimes a "Hard" clearing of cache may be necessary. To do this, power off completely, and unplug every wire connected to the box. 15 minutes later, plug everything back in and power back on. (Thank you Rod! )

And when it is done, don't forget to restart the browser.

One of BrainKing's unique features is that it doesn't hide the exact number of registered users. Why should we? Instead of showing a grandiloquent banner "we have 2,000,000+ registered users!" without any further information or details, BrainKing enables anybody to check the current number at the Player List page and take advantage of more detailed statistics (e.g. the numbers sorted by most represented countries, fast AJAX search box to look for users without reloading the whole page, etc.).
So, what's the point? That page shows two date values for each users - the first login time (hint - in order to find out the exact date and time when BrainKing had been launched, read the first login value for the user with ID=1 - Fencer - that's me ) and the last action time. The latter one is a good indicator of the particular account activity - if the last action date value is, say, 23rd September 2003, the account is probably inactive and not used anymore. Finally, we've come to the purpose of this article. Let's summarize the consequences:

• Question: Why cannot my account be deleted? I don't want to use BrainKing anymore.
• Answer: The user ID is the most important value on BrainKing and is used almost everywhere - your ID is linked with your games, discussion posts, private messages, statistical data, etc. If the account is deleted from the database, the structure of all other tables which are linked with your user ID would become corrupted. It makes no harm to leave the account inactive - just stop logging in and if you edit your profile before that and remove all private information, there will be nothing left which could be misused.
  By the way, why would someone leave BrainKing? There is nothing better around the world! (just kidding)
• Question: I want to create an account or rename my current user name to something more attractive. When I try to do so, BrainKing returns a message this user name is already used. However, the other account which occupies my desired user name is inactive. Is there a way to solve it?
• Answer: There is always a way to solve virtually everything. This case is really simple - just send me a message with a request of unblocking the user name you want to use for yourself, and I will do it as soon as possible.
  Which reminds me - maybe I could add a feature which would solve these issues automatically. In the future.

Okay, that's enough for today. Time to relax with a mulled wine and some impressive movie from my DVD collection.

BrainKing is currently translated to 15 languanges and I proudly call it a "multilingual site". Which is great, we are open to many people who don't speak English and other English-only game sites are virtually impossible to use for them. By the way, did you know the third biggest community on BrainKing comes from Turkey? (after USA and Czech Republic)
So, what's the problem with that? I occasionally receive an e-mail of this type: "I have clicked somewhere and now I see BrainKing in some foreign language, I don't understand a word, help me!". Fortunatelly, the solution is very easy. After logging in, find the section of language flags:

This section is located at the top right or the bottom left corner (depending on your layout, but most users would find it at the top right). Click on the English flag and you are rescued.