BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

I remember the situation which happened during December 2005. Many people paid for a membership and attached a note "please activate this membership as of 24th December because it is meant to be a Christmas present". Doing this work manually is not the best approach, that's why I have just implemented the following feature.

If you add one or more items to the BrainKing's shopping cart and proceed to checkout, you should see a new column Activation time on the page of your order which is not placed yet. The default value of this attribute is instantly and it is equivalent to the standard behavior - the item (usually a membership) is activated immediately after the payment is received. Now you can click the change link and set a specific date and time, when you wish the item should be activated in the future.

What's the advantage of this? For example, if you plan to buy a membership for someone else as a Christmas or birthday present and want to make it as a surprise which appears at a scheduled date and time, just use this new feature, complete the payment process and BrainKing will handle the rest automatically. I hope it won't collapse if a big number of activation requests will be processed at the same time.

I know it is an eternal problem and there is probably no 100% positive solution for everyone, so I don't want to solve it. This is just a short response to the related questions:

• Is it allowed to use a computer program to help me playing games on BrainKing? Generally said, it is not, everyone should use only own abilities to play the games, because BrainKing's main purpose is to enable playing against live opponents. However, it is virtually impossible to recognize whether someone looks at the result of a, say, good Chess program, in order to get a hint for a move or two. Which means, if a player plans to get a help from books or other external resources (it is not forbidden in correspondence games), it might be good to inform the opponent about it. A fair play is a fair play.

My experience is that the majority of BrainKing players really don't use computers to assist them in games. Shortly said, the highlighted problem is not a big problem at all.

As a part of the comprehensive integration of PayPal services with BrainKing game site, I have added an automatic processing of subscriptions of membership levels which are different to the current one of the particular paying member.

I think the best way to describe this new feature would be an example:

• Let's suppose it is 14th November 2006 today. A user with the Brain Rook membership level, which is to expire as of 20th December 2006, purchases a one year Brain Knight membership.
• When the payment is completed and BrainKing receives a notification from PayPal, it will mark the order paid and create a record about the future subscription.
• When the current Brain Rook membership expires (20th December 2006), the expire agent finds a subscription record in the database and instead of turning the user to Brain Pawn, it automatically changes his level to Brain Knight with a year subscription.

It is definitely safer and more convenient than making notes about future subscriptions, which can be easily overlooked.
I have 3 more additional features of this kind in my TODO list and where they are implemented, I hope I'll be able to pass almost all payment processing job to BrainKing only and get more time for development.

As you have probably noticed, the sixteenth full localization of BrainKing has been released yesterday. The new supported language is Estonian and I am very pleased to see that we are open to even more game enthusiasts who don't speak English.

Just a reminder: If you want to see the status of other started translations (and similar language related features), please visit the Languages page on BrainKing. It contains some interesting information and statistics as well.

Okay, who is going to submit http://BrainKing.com/ee to Estonian search engines and web catalogs?

The recent launch of the Brain Bishop membership level has started a hunt for non-paying members who would like to be given a membership, according to the current monthly action. Since the standard process of announcing like posting "I want to sponsor 10 Brain Bishop memberships, send me a message if you are interested" to discussion boards is not too effective, I have created a new system to support this idea.

This is a short description (a more detailed one might be posted later):

• A pawn, who wants a free membership, goes to the Paid Membership page and click the new link Pawn registry.
• He fills a very simple form and submits the request.
• Another member, who wants to sponsor someone, goes to the Pawn registry page too and select a request which looks the most interesting to him. Then he continues to the standard shopping cart process.
• When the order is placed and payment is received, the request will be automatically marked as paid with the particular sponsor name.

By the way, even this feature does not guarantee that all such requests will be addressed. But it can increase the chance of success.

This is just a quick note (with a short delay) about the new Stairs feature which has been announced yesterday. The initial check of inactive Stairs players has been processed succesfully and 1053 Stairs-Player combinations has been put to a retirement.

This check will be called once a day but I guess the following lists of inactivities won't be that long. Anyway, the Stairs system should be better balanced now.

If you play in BrainKing Stairs, you might have already faced a problem which was brought to my attention many times in the past, and I have made an attepmt to fix it at last. What is it about? Imagine this situation: A player signs up for selected Stairs, appears at the first step and then, for some reason, stops coming to BrainKing for several months. It means that if someone else challenges this player (and the game is instantly created), the challenger will always win by a timeout, which allows players to advance to higher steps with no effort and no risk.

All right, how does it work now? BrainKing's system of regular tasks performs a check once a day. This process checks all Stairs players for their site activity and if it finds that the user was not logged in for more than 30 days, it automatically puts him to a retirement at all Stairs he plays. And when the player comes back to BrainKing and wishes to continue playing his Stairs, he can easily end the retirements manually.

And since it is a new feature and has been tested only locally on my development environment, I will probably stay awake during this night to observe its behaviour. It should be invoked a minute after our midnight (GMT+01:00).

The arrogance of Google is incredible. Although they disabled my AdSense account some months ago for no apparent reason and still owe me several thousand dollars, I've received a "happy birthday" and "we wish you higher AdSense revenues" e-mail from them today. After a good laugh I have almost forgotten that all these e-mails, despite the fact they are trying to look friendly and with a touch of human personality, are actually generated by numb robots.

However, this funny event gave me an idea of creating something like "agent pool" on BrainKing. Since our database stores many gigabytes of data and more than 2 million games (and this number is rapidly growing), it's harder and harder to find a concrete information, e.g. all chess games with accepted king's gambit opening which were won by a white player. So, why not to pass this boring work to the robots instead?

It is just an idea, nothing is implemented yet. But since I like to build new features using the data which already exist (instead of generating new ones), the idea has a great chance to be realized. Sooner or later.

Tip of the night:
Modern web browsers do many things for us and make our surfing experience easier. That's great. However, it is important to pay attention whether we don't activate a previously inactive feature (maybe by accident) which we really don't want to have.
This is one example, based on a message I've got today and since it can happen to more people, it might be better to post the solution here.

• Question: When I try to write my user name on BrainKing's login page, it is automatically prefilled after writing several first letters and my password appears as well (in asterisks). I am afraid it is not safe because if someone else uses this computer and knows my user name, he can log in without knowing my password. What can I do now? I use Internet Explorer 6.


• Answer: This behaviour is a consequence of previously saved user name and password, using the browser's built-in autocomplete feature. In order to turn it off, follow these instructions:
  • Go to Tools / Internet Options and select the Content tab.
  • Find the AutoComplete section and uncheck the "Use autocomplete for user names and passwords on forms" checkbox.
  • Make sure the "Prompt me to save passwords" checkbox is checked.
  • Click the "Delete passwords" button.
  • Confirm the changes.

Sweet dreams.

• May 2003 - A controversal game of Gothic Chess has been added to the site. Actually, it was launched in March 2003 and announced as the Event of the Year (almost), although there was actually nothing to celebrate (but this fact was revealed later). For those who don't know the details - this chess variant is very similar to Capablanca Chess, which was invented many many years ago, but unlike Capablanca Chess (which is free to use), Gothic Chess was presented as a "licenced game", although the only difference (compared to Capablanca Chess) is in the start positions of two pieces. Since the "licence" attribute caused more problems than advantages (were there any at all?), it's not a big surprise that the game was completely removed from the site in 2005.
  Anyway, this experience gave us an enlightment - don't bother to deal with anyone who wants to misuse your own popularity to promote his licenced product, it's a waste of time (and nerves). There are thousands of free games, which are not of a worse quality. And everyone can be happy.


• June 2003 - Battleboats, Screen Chess and Crazy Screen Chess were added to the site. Since these games introduced a new game type where it is necessary to set up a start position before the game actually starts, a new page Game Editors was launched as well. Its purpose was to maintain a list of favourite start positions or unfinished patterns (for every user separately), in order to use them in games quickly, without a need to define them each time from scratch. And since many players (including me) are too lazy to create a start position manually, piece by piece, a one-click random position generator was added as well. It's a neat feature if you want to start a game as soon as possible.
  And because BrainKing's primary focus is Chess, I added something new for Chess players too. Every Chess game page was enhanced by a new link "download pgn code", in order to get the particular game notation in a well-known format, which can be used to import the game to many Chess programs and continue to play/analyze outside BrainKing.

Some of the BrainKing users have already observed this kind of situation. You are used to use your favourite JavaScript feature of our site, e.g. Rich Text Editor or Autosave, and it suddenly stops working for no apparent reason. Fortunatelly, it does not happen too often, but when it does, there is no need to panic. Let me describe what to do:

• No JavaScript feature is vitally important for your BrainKing account's full functionality. Until the problem is solved, simple stop using it (switch from the Rich Text Editor to a plain text area, etc.)
• Try to upgrade your web browser. There were several issues with Firefox 1.5, but it usually helps to upgrade to 2.0 (which is the recommended version to use anyway).
• Some problems may be browser specific. If it doesn't work with one type, try another one, at least temporarily.
• If you want to report a JavaScript bug, add an error console output, if possible. Firefox offers a JavaScript error console at its Tools menu, so it's easy to copy and paste its content (BrainKing related) to our Bug Tracker.

By the way, the Brain Bishop membership level is kind of popular and will outnumber the Brain Knight level very soon. I will add a new original feature for those who want to sponsor someone else's membership within several days.

I have just improved the BrainKing-PayPal connection by adding two more options to the automatic payment process:

• Membership renewals - as an extension to the former situation, when BrainKing was automatically activating only new memberships, this function works for membership renewals as well. It means that for example, if you want to purchase another year to your current membership level and do it through our shopping cart system with the PayPal option, BrainKing will automatically add the corresponding number of months to your membership period.


• Brains - if you purchase Brains through PayPal, BrainKing will automatically add them to your account just when the payment is received.

The only pending thing is to provide an automatic process for membership downgrading and regular subscriptions. Not a hard task, though.

As I have announced before, it is a reality now. In order to save a manual work of us, the following changed have been implemented a while ago:

• Automatic expirations - unlike before, when we were only notified about the expired memberships and had to handle them manually, now it is fully maintained by BrainKing itself. The server performs an expiration check once a day (our midnight, GMT+01:00) and users with an expired membership are found, BrainKing will automatically turns them back to the Brain Pawn level. In other words, since some members used to send me a message "please give me several more days, I cannot renew my membership immediately", it won't work anymore, because BrainKing's cold logic does not understand a human intervention.


• Automatic payment notifications - if you use PayPal to pay for an order, BrainKing will send you a confirmation message with all details of the automatic process, just when it receives a payment message from PayPal. This feature will be improved in the future, using more advanced methods of the PayPal web services API.

So, it is very important not to postpone the renewal process (if your membership is about to expire) to the very last day. A payment can be delayed (especially if a bank transfer is used) and BrainKing could easily deactivate your higher level before the money is actually received.

There are some pending details about the October Action results, let me post them here:

• As already announced, the main prize - 2 years of Brain Rook membership - was given to the 8th place. The rest of top ten positions received a tenfold of their position numbers - 1st place gets 10 Brains, 2nd one 20 Brains, etc., 10th place gets 100 Brains. Does it look unfair? Yes. No. The secret codes will be generated later doday. At that time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight O'clock.


• The two winners of the break the 10,000 moves a day limit contest have been awarded with a full retail version of Jets'n'Guns PC game.

And there are some new smileys too. 15, I guess:

I wish we have an agent who would do the programming work for us. Well, not ALL work, of course, the core parts of BrainKing are too complex to be maintainable without a human intervention, but some small tasks could be covered by it. For example, the monthly actions and related bonuses.

As I have announced before, the automatic payment processing system (using PayPal) is already up and running, so if you pay for a new membership, BrainKing will do the whole process itself and we don't need to make a single click. However, the system is not aware of temporary bonuses or other special features, so if you, for example, pay for a Brain Bishop level during this month, you will see only 1 month of your new membership, although the action promises two. It means that there is a short delay until we add the bonus month manually.

Please, be patient, I want to finish a simple software agent to handle the monthly actions as soon as possible. Meanwhile, if I forgot to add a bonus to your account, please don't hesitate to remind me. We are only human beings.