BrainKing Knowledge Base

I have noticed that several people have a little problem when they want to pay a membership for a friend because they don't use the correct way on the Paid Membership page and simply pay for themselves instead. Which means an extra work for me and also could mean a little trouble after we make this process automatic (however, PayPal drives me crazy because they still didn't make our account able to receive funds although they had promised to do so 3 weeks ago!).

Okay, let me describe the order process step by step:

• Go to the Paid Membership page and find the target membership line, then click on the change link next to your user name at the Membership section.
• Use the Find user form to locate your friend's ID.
• After you successfully select yoru friend's user name, you should see the Paid Membership page again but with the friend's name instead of yours. Click on Add to cart button and use the rest of the standard way to place the order.

I feel very sleepy now, so I will post the important topic (which was promised yesterday) tomorrow. Shortly, it should be about the entry point of the BrainKing.com site, which is usually referred as Login Page.

First of all, there is one current issue of several users having small problems to access the BrainKing site. I was told by our serverhousing company that they should be testing and changing some routers to upgrade the global connectivity. Although this action happened several days ago, there could be small negative consequences, causing occasional downtimes of the line (not the site), especially for users outside Czech Republic. I hope it will be stabilized very soon, anyway it's not a serious problem.

The real purpose of this entry is to highlight several points related to the e-mails which are sent to BrainKing administrators either through the Contact Us page or to the info@brainking.com address directly:

• As it is clearly written on the Contact Us page, BrainKing administrators speak only English and Czech. Therefore it makes no sense to send us an e-mail in Turkish (for example) although BrainKing is fully translated to this language, because we would have to ask for a help with the translation anyway. I can say we also understand easy questions or requests in Russian, Polish, French and German but we would respond in English anyway.
• If you want us to help you, please try to describe your problem as much as possible. A short note "it doesn't work", "I cannot login" or "what is my user name" is really not enough. I wouldn't write about it but since I receive such e-mails almost every week, I guess it cannot hurt if I drop a note about them.
• When you write a direct e-mail to info@brainking.com, please make sure you use a descriptive subject for it, otherwise you risk that your e-mail won't pass through the anti-spam filter and will be lost before it can reach us.

Enough for today, I guess there are no other important things about this subject now.

I have posted a short article about automatic link replacements yesterday. And, as always, a new feature brings out a demand for more new features. That's why I have decided to extend the possibilities and this is the (current) final list:

• A tournament URL http://brainking.com/en/Tournaments?trg=13439 would be changed to The Magnificent 128.
• Posting http://brainking.com/en/Pond?g=2650 will cause a change to Weekly Rain Pain XXXIII.
• If you post http://brainking.com/en/ShowGame?g=1, BrainKing will change it to Five in Line (Liquid vs. Fencer).
• A profile link http://brainking.com/en/Profile?u=2 converts to Liquid.
• If you make a fellowship link http://brainking.com/en/ShowFellowship?fid=2, Blizzards appears as a replacement.

Feel free to post new ideas about this subject.

You might have noticed that when you post a tournament URL to a discussion board or private message, BrainKing automatically converts it to a clickable link containing the tournament name. This feature was added more than 6 months ago and seems to be useful, especially for those who are not familiar with HTML tags.

I have improved this function today a little. Now it works not only for tournaments, but for ponds and games as well. For example:

• Posting http://brainking.com/en/Pond?g=2650 will cause a change to Weekly Rain Pain XXXIII.
• If you post http://brainking.com/en/ShowGame?g=1, BrainKing will change it to Five in Line (Liquid vs. Fencer).

And if no conversion happens, it means the tournament or pond or game was not found, most likely due to a malformed URL.

Well, actually only one which I have implemented several minutes ago because it is useful for me and it might be useful for other users as well:

• Go to the next message after sending this reply is a new option which appears when you send a reply to a message and next messages are currently available. If you select this checkbox and send the reply, you will be redirected to the next message page. In other words, it works just like Delete and Next button but this actions does not delete anything. Unless you select Delete the original message after sending this reply as well.

And the last new feature of this day - since some user descriptions on Profile pages are very long, they were moved to the bottom of the page. It means that it's no longer necessary to scroll down several pages in order to send a game or tournament or fellowship invitation.

BrainKing is not 100% bug free site. It is a plain truth and nobody wants to disprove this statement. But, hey, there is some good (?) news - the same thing can be said about all other sites on the web, which are at least a little more complicated than a batch of static pages which never change. That's the reason why BrainKing provides its own built-in Bug Tracker and this article will try to describe its correct usage:

• Bug Tracker is for reporting bugs, not asking questions. If you want to ask about something you don't understand, e.g. "why cannot I move the E4 piece to the F5 square?", it is recommended to use the Contact Us page instead. In 99% cases it is not a bug but a misunderstanding of the particular game rules.
• When you find an obvious bug and want to file a report, try to write as many useful information as possible, then we would be able to solve the problem much faster. For example, if you found a bug in a game you play, add the game ID, the move number where it happened, etc.
• If you want to report a strange behaviour of the site in general, always provide the information about your OS (Windows XP, Linux, MacOS, ...) and your web browser type (Internet Explorer, Firefox, WebTV, ...). Some issues can be browser related and we need to know which browser to use for testing.
• And, of course, before reporting a bug, first of all try to find out if the same bug is not already reported by someone else. I know there is no search feature on the Bug Tracker page yet but I want to add it as soon as possible.

I have added two new features to the Message Box system. Actually, the first one was added yesterday but it is better to announce them together, not separately.

• There is a new option on the Settings page: The number of new messages points to: a) newest new message b) oldest new message. With a combination of the "Delete and Next" button, it can be a convenient way how to go through all new messages with minimal clicks.
• A new button Invert the selection on the Message Box page. Clicking on that will change the checked status of all message on this page.

Comments and suggestions are appreciated as always.

Since the day D when backgammon games had been launched on BrainKing, players started to post their theories about the dice. The most popular topics were "the dice are not fair!", "do the paying members have better dice rolls than the pawns?", "who come that my opponent has rolled 6-6 five times in a row?" etc. Although all questions of this kind were already answered on the discussion boards, it might be better to make a list of them here, in order to have them archived on one place:

• The dice rolls are really random and no special rules are applied on them. The only value which is used to calculate the roll is the current server time in milliseconds. This value is unique for every roll (because it is called when the game page is viewed for the first time by the player to move) and since the exact time of call depends on the network latency and the actual server load, it is absolutely impossible to predict it. Shortly said, dice are random and fair, nobody has an advantage. Not even the site owner.
• The theory of paying members being favoured and getting better dice rolls than pawns is a complete myth. As I said at the previous paragraph, nobody has an advantage, no matter which membership level he has.
• The theory of "Czech users have better dice rolls because the site owner is from Czech Republic" is an absolute nonsense too. BrainKing is an international site and all nationalities are treated equally.

The problem of auto-pass will be addressed at some of the next entries.

The paying members who were with us several years ago probably remember the former simple (maybe too simple) payment way on BrainKing - after selecting a desired membership level and clicking the Pay button, an order was placed and it could be only identified by their user ID. It was not easy to order a membership for another person, pay for more memberships at once, and in some cases (wire transfer, money order) there was no order placement at all and the transaction had to be handled manually.

Fortunatelly, a significant improvement was launched last year and BrainKing supports a nice shopping cart system which can be used for everything - memberships, t-shirts, Brains etc. It provides several methods of payments (more to come, maybe this year) and the process is transparent - whatever payment method you choose, the final order is stored in the database and can be tracked from your profile page.

However, it can occasionally happen that the actual payment process (on PayPal or MoneyBookers) is not completed and the order is left unpaid. Many users usually go to the Paid Membership page again and place a new order with the same parameters. This is not necessary! All you have to do is to go to your Profile page, click on the order list link at the page top, select your order and click on the Pay button again. It doesn't mean you would pay for the same thing more times because no real payment is made on BrainKing pages - you will be just redirected to the third party payment service again.

If you follow these simple instructions, your list of BrainKing orders would be better arranged, without too many cancelled orders.

Since the BrainKing's Brains (not "brains" as you know this word, but something like credits or points or virtual currency ) have become more popular than ever, due to the recently launched actions, they are the current hot topic to answer some questions:

• As I have already announced, there is a new option to earn Brains by writing articles for the BrainRook.com site. The option has been added to the Brains page as well.
• It is not possible to transfer Brains between users. It could be easily misused, for example if we create a simple action where everyone can win 50 Brains and ten people would make an agreement and transferred their prizes to a single person, he would get a free membership for nothing. In other words, your Brains balance is only yours and there is no way to share it with anyone else.
• It is absolutely impossible to convert Brains to a real money. BrainKing is not a bank and even if we want to, it would be illegal to keep Brains as a real bank account. The only way to spend Brains is on the BrainKing.com site and the list of possibilities can be found on the Brains page. It means that no requests like "I would like to withdraw my 450 Brains, please send the corresponding amount in Euro to my bank account" can be addressed.

Since the Secret Action Points mania is growing every month, let me clarify the more frequently asked questions:

• The algorhithm has been significantly improved and all kinds of points can be accessed with any web browser. No more restrictions to Internet Explorer only.
• Although the secret points formula has been changed and made more sophisticated, I don't want to reveal its secrets, not even the last month methods. Please don't ask me to do so.
• The location of secret points can be different every day, and even different for every user. Moreover, the amount of points earned for a secret action can be different each time, and so is the maximum of the secret points a day. However, there are still the same chances for everyone to gather the daily maximum.

On the other hand, playing games is still more interesting, isn't it?