BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

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.

According to a recent request I've just added an improvement which I planned to do several months ago but it was buried at too long TODO list, although the implementation was very easy. In order to have a message box better organized (before a search feature is added), you can display messages from a selected user only. It can be accessed in two ways:

• Open a message and click on show this user messages link next to the From: line at the message header.
• Open a user's Profile page and click on the same link at the page top, next to the user's name.

All other features using the message list (Next button, Previous button, Delete and Next button, links to more pages) were improved to reflect this new feature as well.

By the way, since the last remaining Golden Rook membership has expired this morning, I have removed this membership level completely because the majority of former Golden Rooks already upgraded to the Black Rook level and there is no reason to keep the Golden level anymore.

If you come to BrainKing.com site every day, you have probably noticed that at least one new entry appears on this blog site every day as well. Several users have already requested an option to disable showing a new blog entry alert on the BrainKing.com's Main Page because they are subscribed to the blog's RSS feed too (and I think this option can be added for paying members, no problem).

I have also received a question about the background of the blog entries - if I want to continue posting articles every day, what are they going to be about? There are three main sources of the inspiration:

• Current important events - yes, it was the main purpose to create the BrainKing.info site in the past, to inform our users about scheduled outages, new games (have you noticed Scrambled Eggs yesterday? ), new localizations (languages) etc.
• New features description - we continuously add new features to the BrainKing.com site, usually small ones, which are not worth mentioning in the Server News, but this blog is a good opportunity to describe them closely or post useful tips and tricks for their best usage.
• Discussion comments - we observe and monitor the main discussion boards every day and if an interesting topic is discussed, it can become a good source for a new blog entry. It is also another possibility to continue with the open discussion after the corresponding thread is buried under new ones, because everyone who registers on this site can write comments to all posts.

And, of course, this list is not finished, new sources of the inspiration can emerge every day as well.

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.

Today's entry is about games which are simple (speaking of rules) but powered with a high potential and deep strategy. Their advantage is obvious - a player can learn the rules very quickly and start to play minutes after noticing that such game exists and is playable on BrainKing. These games deserve a better publicity, which is the reason why I occassionally drop a note which can start an interesting discussion.
I think that BrainKing provides several game types which are very interesting and promise a great playing experience but they are lacking a theory background, in order to give some strategy tips to novice players. I am talking about modern board games (Lines of Action, Breakthrough, ...) and also about ancient but not too wide-spread games (PahTum, Jarmo, Froglet, ...). BrainKing wants to promote these (and many more) games as much as possible and if we fill the BrainRook.com page with useful tips for the mentioned games, I would call it a big success.

It is really nice to see how many people are enthusiastic about our site and submit glorifying articles of "BrainKing is the best!" type. The opinion of the users is always important. However, the BrainRook.com site should not be only about this topic. I encourage article writers to contribute with interesting articles about game strategies, game history, local game event reports etc. because:

1. we want to know what is going on in other countries,
2. we are interested in expert game articles which could become a nice addition to the Game Rules page and
3. we award these articles with more Brains than the other ones.

Simply said, we want to create the best resource site for everyone who likes board games and want to get as good information as possible.

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.

Okay, why do so many people talk about the Secret Action Points? They are not the main purpose to visit BrainKing or are they? Anyway, this short article (and the recent change to the points system) was inspired by the following complaint:

"I want to play my games but I cannot because all my opponents only hunt the secret points like crazy and don't want to play anymore!"

Actually, this is something which should be addressed because BrainKing is a game site, not a click-through site. And the solution already is here, simple, effective, active and launched. How does it work now?

You cannot get more secret points than you have normal points for making moves in games during the same day.

For example, if you have 150 move points, you cannot earn more than 150 secret points, until you make more moves and increase the number of move points. And if you don't move in any games, you won't get any secret points at all.

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.

According to the September Action on BrainKing, we have started to collect articles written by our users. I am pleased to announce the first two submission have been posted to the new site BrainRook.com and the authors have been awarded with Brains. I just want to remind, it is a good opportunity for everyone to help to increase BrainKing's popularity and traffic, and to gather enough Brains which could be converted to a free membership on BrainKing. Don't miss the September Action!

Please read all information and instructions here and feel free to post your comments or suggestions.

We plan to do an important database maintenance tomorrow. The outage of BrainKing sites (which cannot work without the database server) will be done as of 5th September 2006, 8:00 a.m. GMT+01:00 and the inactivity should not be longer than one hour. If the downtime exceeds 60 minutes, all game timeouts will be automatically disabled.
Thank you for understanding.

As you have probably noticed, we have a small box Tip of the Day at the right column of BrainKing.com pages. The purpose of this feature is to show useful tips to use our site, and the current tip is randomly selected from the list of all tips. The box can be turned off, so if you don't want to be bothered with the tips because you already know everything about BrainKing ;-), you can remove it from your pages.

Well, what is my point here? The problem is that the list of tips is very short and, which is worse, very outdated. Some of the entries are not valid anymore and I don't have time to maintain the list on a regular basis (not even on an irregular one ). So I want to give another chance to BrainKing users to share their experiences, get some publicity and get something more in return, for a good work.

All right, this is the plan:

• If you can add your suggestion to the list of Tips of the Day, please send me a message on the BrainKing.com site. The message should contain these fields:
  • A short description of the tip, max. 255 characters. It is equivalent to the current tips of the day on BrainKing.
  • A long description of the tip, if you want to add more information, examples, etc. This field is optional, you can submit a tip with a short description only.
  • Whether you want to publish the tip with your BrainKing user name (it would be shown below the tip) or anonymously.
• You can submit any number of tips, there is no limitation.
• Tips should be send in English or Czech. They will be localized by the translators afterwards.
• If your tip is approved, and you are the first one who submitted it (in case of more people sending the same tip), I will give you 5-20 Brains, depending on the tip quality.
• The tips won't be published immediately, I have to develop a new system of tips first. But sooner a nice number of tips is gathered, better the system can be tested and released faster.

And I wanted to make this entry short. Which reminds me, what about a special prize for the author who sends the very first article for the September Action?

I am too busy today so I'll make it short. If you are a good programmer and have experiences with Firefox extensions development (and want to do something for BrainKing), don't hesitate to contact me. I started to develop a BrainKing extension for Firefox a year ago, but due to the lack of time I don't think I would finish this project myself, without a help of another volunteer. A nice prize could be given for a good work.

And since I like to test new things, I've added a Wikipedia Finder feature to this blog. You can find it at the right column, just below the language chooser. You can find the instructions at the same place, feel free to try it, it can be occasionally useful because Wikipedia is a great free source of information, although BrainKing still does not have its own entry.