BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

The first version of the previously announced icon uploading feature has been released a while ago. If you are a paying member, you should see a new link change icon at the top of your Profile page (actually, due to a small bug this link is visible for all users but if a pawn clicks on it, it won't work). It points to a file upload page which contains instructions how to submit an image without e-mailing it.

Please don't expect miracles. I wouldn't be surprised if some bugs appear but if nothing goes wrong, it should be working. It is enabled for user icons only and after the testing period is over, this tool will be applied on big photos and fellowship flags as well.

And, of course, no uploaded image can be seen by other users until it is approved by the administrators.

The autosave feature which was released yesterday seems to be a useful thing, so I have extended its field of focus and now it should be working for personal messages and in-game conversations as well.

Please note that it will probably not save a draft which is written to a quick reply box. I have not tested this case yet. Anyway, as I already said, it should work with all major browsers, if JavaScript is not disabled by the user.

There was a small bug which caused that BrainKing didn't recognize an automatic payment notification from PayPal under some circumstances. Hopefully it is fixed now, so if you pay for a new membership on PayPal, it should be automatically activates within seconds after the payment is processed.

Yesterday I have announced more improvements to the discussion board system and I have finally completed one of them. It is called autosave, it is available for paying members only and if your browser supports AJAX, you should see a link Autosave is disabled (change) next to the subject line at the discussion board page form. This is a default value and clicking the change link will show a Settings page where this value can be changed to an interval in seconds.

How does it work? When the autosave is active and you start to type a new post, BrainKing will automatically save your draft after the defined number of seconds (or minutes) and display a green text Autosave OK! (time). And if you don't finish your post for some reason (electricity outage, lost connection, computer failure, ...) and open the same discussion board later, it will display an announcement Saved post found (time) (restore). Click the restore link and the lost draft is back again!

This feature should work with all major browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, ...) and after it is finetuned, it will be used for personal messages and in-game conversations as well.

Regarding the previous entry, timeouts for all games were disabled due to the recent site inactivity. Since everything is working now, the time for games will be re-enabled tomorrow, about 9:00 a.m. GMT+01:00. Which is a midnight for some of our American friends.

I have also added a new page to user Profiles - it is the new link Boards. When you click on it, BrainKing will show you the most recent post of this user (public boards only) and the list of all public discussion boards where this user posted at least once. It can be a handy tool to track a selected user's posting activity or another way to find specific posts.

By the way, there is one more small improvement - the Profile pages display a number of user's started games next to the Started games link, so you can get this information without clicking on this link and viewing the started games page, which can be very long in some cases.

Yes, I know that BrainKing is a game site, not a chat site. But I want to release more features related to discussion boards and I guess that at least one of them will be very useful. Maybe tomorrow ...

You might have noticed some problems with BrainKing site tonight. They were caused by a really rare event - the database which BrainKing uses to store all information is full and must be manually extended by a new data file. It is not a serious problem and it can be easily fixed, but this event belongs to the ones which cannot be resolved automatically, without our assistance.

Please don't panic. Everything is under control and BrainKing will be working soon. The automatic detector of inactivity has turned off the timeout checker, so nobody should lost a game by timeout due to this downtime.

If you were with us since the very start of BrainKing, you probably remember all important events which happened during last four years. If not or you are a new member, you can get some key information right now. I have decided to write this entry because of my own fragile memory too - it might be interesting to recall these events after 10 years.

• April 2002 - the very first element of future BrainKing structure was designed. Based on experiences from other game sites, I had an ambiguous notion of the basic set of BrainKing feature list and started to gather all missing information and resources. By the way, besides Liquid and me, there was a third guy who was meant to develop with us, mostly a 3D interface of game pages, but it turned out to be a side cut, so we were finally established as a two-guys team. A curiosity - when we wanted to find a good name for the game site, the third guy came up with the name PlayBrain (probably after reading too much PlayBoy issues ) and it was used as a working title until the final BrainKing name was definitely set by me. I guess it sounds better. Although it might be harder to pronounce for non-English speaking people.


• September 2002 - the domain BrainKing.com was registered which meant that the BrainKing name was definitely set and established. A test environment of the beta version of BrainKing was temporarily launched on Liquid's home computer and connected through his cable modem (256/64 kbps line) - not the fastest connection but good enough for a couple of testers who were trying to play the first games and reporting some initial bugs. The real BrainKing server was built and put to our server housing company. We were lucky that our contract contained a line about an unlimited data traffic - I was formerly thinking that a 50 GB/month limit could be enough since we only transfer HTML pages and a couple of small pictures, there were no big downloads. I couldn't be more wrong, of course - the real current traffic is 25-30 GB a day and growing every month.


• October 2002 - the BrainKing site was officially launched, providing only 5 game types (Chess, Corner Chess, Fortress Chess, Horde Chess and Five in Line), several discussion boards, a message box and BKR charts. No tournaments, no fellowships, no regular tasks. Only English and Czech version. And many bugs. However, it was kind of a success, especially due to the site speed - there were only a few users, there was no big load. From my current programmer's point of view, the source code of that starting version of BrainKing was awful - I still don't understand how it could be working at all. At least, there was a really big place for an improvement. Due to the lack of resources (there were no paying members at the beginning, of course) everything was running on one computer - BrainKing itself, database, backup service, mail server, etc.

(to be continued)

As you probably know, BrainKing handles many things in background, without any user interaction. It must check running games for possible timeouts, tournaments for their status, expired memberships etc., and must do it regularry. Since people occasionally ask about things which are related to this topic, like "why my game shows -4 minutes as time left" or "when will my tournament be started", I would like to describe what BrainKing does and when and why:

• Timeout task - called every 10 minutes, its purpose is obvious. If a game timeouted between two calls, its time left value would be shown as a negative number. It is not a bug.
• Tournament task - called once an hour, 5 minutes after (e.g. 5:05, 6:05, 7:05, ...). It starts tournaments after their deadlines, generates next rounds and finishes those with all games completed. It also handles team tournaments, team matches and ponds.
• Position task - called once an hour, 5 minutes after a half (e.g. 5:35, 6:35, 7:35, ...). It recalculates player positions of all game types, based on current BKR values. This is the reason why your position is not changed immediately after your game is finished.
• Membership task - called once a day, 5 minutes after a midnight. It checks memberships of all paying members and marks the expired ones. In a near future it will also turn the expired members back to pawns automatically.

There are several sub-tasks which do something with Action Points but I cannot recall any details at the moment, being too tired after a hard working day. Anyway, they are not important.

It is not a rare situation - a BrainKing user decides to upgrade to a higher membership level, places the order, makes the online payment, the money is deducted from his account and - nothing happens. The user must wait for us to get online and activate the membership manually. But many people expect an instant result after their payment is finished, just like big companies usually provide. What about BrainKing?

Yes, I want to announce good news - I have just implemented the first version of a two-way integration of BrainKing and PayPal. What does it mean? If you use our shopping cart system (on the Paid Membership page), choose PayPal as the payment option, place the order, click the Pay button and make the payment, BrainKing should detect this process almost immediately and automatically do the rest - marks your order as paid and activates your membership.

Easy, huh? However, since this feature is kind of sensitive and not fully tested yet, at this moment it works only if a new membership is created, not if an existing one is renewed. All required functions will be supported as soon as possible. But it can be a good start, although I don't guarantee it works with no bugs. Now we only need volunteers to test it.

It does not happen too often and, from my point of view, it's a trivial issue which is not worth mentioning as a standalone entry, but since I have received an e-mail of this kind today and I receive similar e-mails at least once a month, I guess the obvious facts could be put together at once and for all possible future questions (although there are still many people who don't read this blog).

The entry is about currencies. As you know, BrainKing's official currency is Euro and all prices are defined and calculated in Euro. However, Euro is not a usual currency in all countries, especially in those at the west side of Atlantic Ocean, and the mentioned e-mails usually contain a question: "How much is the membership in USD?" I don't want to talk about more bizarre questions like "What the hell is Euro?" (yes, I've really received such e-mails!) but, in order to address the first one, there is a descriptive link How much is it in my currency? at the Paid Membership page and this link points to a nice site XE.com, which provides an universal currency converter. I've just made the mentioned link in a larger font, so it should be better recognized and not to be missed anymore.

The conclusion - if you want to get the prices of BrainKing's memberships in USD or any other currency, go to the Paid Membership page, click the "How much is it in my currency?" link, write the target amount to the converter form, select the target currency and submit the form. Easy, straightforward, understandable.

Actually, I wanted to write about something completely different today but since it is Saturday and not a working day (By the way, is there a difference? I work every day anyway, holidays don't exist. ), I was too occupied with other things and couldn't finish the image upload support on BrainKing which was announced yesterday. Well, it is almost finished and works nice on my computer but there are some minor issues to resolve before it can be released.

However, it reminds me that one of the next entries of this blog could be devoted to the BrainKing's development process itself. It might be interesting to describe the background of the site evolution and how it is different to the standard of big software companies (since we are a one man show, from a programming point of view).

All right, this picture, grabbed from our statistics page, shows that the number of Internet Explorer users is decreasing and Firefox is increasing. Good news? Probably yes. BrainKing is compatible with all major browsers, so it makes not a big difference whether you use Firefox or not, but generally said, I recommend to use Firefox. It is the main test environment where I test new features before they are released and I have only good experiences with it. But, of course, make your own decision.

I apologize to everyone who sent me a picture to be used as the user's icon on BrainKing. Due to lack of free time, I couldn't upload them yet, but they should appear later today.

This is one of the long term issues which should be resolved soon. I want to add a support of uploading images by users without my assistance, you will simply choose a picture from your computer or website, click "Upload" and BrainKing will do the rest automatically. It won't be finished today because the process is a little bit complex (automatic image resizing, a denial of too big files, image format conversion etc.) but I guess it is worth it because this feature would save a lot of time - for you and for me too.

By the way, a new Black Rook has appeared yesterday. It is nice to see that people still find this level of membership interesting, even if we currently don't have any special action or discount.

Starting today, after a long wait and a significant delay (3 weeks after the announced date) PayPal finally added Czech Republic to their list of countries which are provided with full-featured accounts. From a user's point of view, it means no change - the "Pay" button after placing an order on BrainKing still looks the same and the actual payment process should remain unchanged as well - but the money go directly to our PayPal account (fencer@brainking.com), so we don't need a help of anybody else anymore (but they have our big thanks ).

There is one more advantage - having a full control on the PayPal payments, we can implement an automatic system to handle payments and activate memberships immediately after the payment is finished. It won't be done tomorrow because it's not a trivial task, but it should be implemented as soon as possible (and don't ask me when exactly).

Although BrainKing's membership fees are low (the cheapest level is only 0.05 Euro a day), there are people who either think different or cannot send a payment due to other reasons. It's nothing I would want to complain about, it's really up to every single person to choose the level of membership to use. The purpose of this article is to make a list of other options to get a paid membership.

I think we were already discussing them on BrainKing's discussion boards but it won't hurt to do it again here:

• Brains - the page of Brains contains all details about earning Brains and using them to buy a membership:
  • Refer new paying members - if someone decides to purchase a membership and marks you as the one who referred him, you get the corresponding amount of Brains, depending on the purchased membership level and subscribed period.
  • Sign up for Brains tournaments - some tournaments require an entry fee in Brains to sign up and the winner receives Brains as a prize (at least a double of the entry fee, usually more).
  • Suggest interesting Tips of the Day - if you send me a good and interesting tip which is not already listed on the Tips of the Day page and your tip is approved, you get 5-20 Brains as a reward.
  • Write original articles for BrainRook.com site - BrainRook.com is another project of ours and its purpose is to provide quality articles about board games and related topics. An approved article is awarded with 50-200 Brains.
• Translations - BrainKing is currently localized to 15 languages and more then 10 another translations are already in progress. If you are a native speaker of a language which is not supported yet and your English is very good, you can send me an offer of translating BrainKing to your language. A quality translation can be honoured with a membership for free. But beware - it is a long and hard process, BrainKing contains really many pages and entries to translate. However, there are people who already made the full localization alone, with no help of anybody else, and still continue to do so.
• Become a business partner - if you know a company which looks for a good advertising space with a huge worldwide traffic, convince them to make a contract with us and get a share of the revenues. "Real" companies are preferred, not any advertising or link exchange networks. More details about this subject will be posted later (but you can start your search now ).

Is that all? If I forgot to mention something, please let me know.
Shortly said, a membership on BrainKing is accessible for everyone. If someone cannot afford to pay, there are many other options to get it. And I am sure this list will be extended by new ones in the future.

A curious situation has been brought to my attention several days ago. Two users (non-paying members) who probably decided to win the Action Points contest at all costs, found a small bug which allowed them to start more Stairs games than the limit of their membership level was. It wouldn't normally be a big issue but since the moves at tournaments/matches/stairs games are worth more action points than those of normal games, it was very unfair to the other users.

Fortunatelly I have located the bug source and fixed it, so it cannot happen again. However, since no site is absolutely bug free (and BrainKing's structure is already very complicated, providing really many features), we don't like to see when someone finds a bug and keeps misusing it, instead of reporting.

That's why I would like to ask for a small favor - if you find a bug, please report it as soon as possible and don't try to take advantage of it, in order to boost a BKR, get more action points, etc. Nobody likes such behaviour, especially the administrators. Our goal is to provide as good service to everyone as possible and the best way to reach it is a good cooperation. I am sure the majority of users understands what I mean.

As I can see, several players have already noticed that I have added a game of Minishogi to the BrainKing site today. It is a modern variant of Shogi (Japanese Chess), which is played on 5x5 board with a reduced set of pieces, so the games should be finished faster than in classic Shogi. And after more Shogi variants are implemented and added, I will create a new category for them.

By the way, our stats say that we had more than 60,000 unique visitors in September. "Unique" means that each of them came from a different IP address and it is a new record in our history. Keep promoting and bringing new players.