BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Due to a small bug on the Stairs and Fellowships pages, some people were able to play the game of Cloning Backgammon although it was in a test mode, which means not officially available. Luckily, this situation didn't cause any troubles and it helped to solve some additional minor issues.

This backgammon variant was created by Jos Boudestein and, if I am not mistaken, BrainKing is the only site where this game can be played. The rules will be posted later today. Anyway, it can be a fun to try to play it without known rules and only guess the differences.

Two small enhancements:

• Move and go to the next game with a friend action has been added. If you don't see it while you submit a move, go to your Settings page and turn this option on.


• Autosave feature on the Notepad page. It can be useful if you write a long note to your notepad and the network connection suddenly dies out.

There is a new inconspicuous option on the Settings / JavaScript page on BrainKing which has been added yesterday. I wanted to add it a long time ago but there were always more important tasks to do, as usual. Well, it is finally here and I am glad to use it.

Okay, the option is called Show message previews at the Message box and when it is activated, it allows you to see previews (limited to 1000 characters) of message bodies at your Message Box. Simply hover the mouse cursor over a message subject line and you should see a nice result.

There is one known "bug" (or a missing feature, more like) - the tooltip does not display the generated body part (e.g. the finished game result, etc.) yet. This small issue is to be solved soon as well.

• Question: Why do you offer a lifetime membership for the tenfold amount of a normal year subscription? Isn't it better to make people pay annually instead?


• Answer: A lifetime membership option is something like a promise that BrainKing won't disappear after 3 years. Furthermore, since we need to upgrade our hardware, in order to keep a good performance of the site (especially when we plan to implement even more cool features which would mean an increased server load), it is better to collect more money as soon as possible and purchase all necessary components as soon as possible.

Which is, er, um, eh, another good reason why a Black Rook level is a good investment.

One of the most significant drawbacks of common frameworks or systems is that it is too difficult to make them customized to do what we expect them to do. This blog system is not an exception. Thanks to Gror's effort, I could release the entries in Czech too (because I am too busy to translate myself to my native language ) but the multilingual support of the blog seems to be buggy and not working properly. And since I am not the author of the source code, it is a problem.

The easiest solution is to implement our own blog system and use it instead of this one. Which is exactly what I want to do. In a near future.

I am installing, configuring and installing, that's why I am not going to write anything too smart today.

However, we have reached another important milestone today - the number of Black Rooks has reached 50 which is a great result of the Christmas Action so far. For those who are not aware of the details, please read this and this.

It is just a small improvement but since it was requested several times in the past, I have just implemented it. If you visit a game page, for example this one - http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGame?g=1 - you should find a new link Show all games below the game board. This link points to the Profile page of one of the players which displays all finished games which these two players ever played on BrainKing. The games are separated by their type, so it's easy to select the one you are interested in.

Quite a short one but I have been too busy configuring my new development computer. Time for some serious work, at last.

• Question: I am from *some country* and we have public holidays when I cannot access the web to play on BrainKing. Is there a chance you could add these days to the BrainKing's list of public holidays?
• Answer: BrainKing is an international site and if we support all possible holidays of all countries, there could be no normal days left and no timeouts would ever occur. Moreover, some people have made a sport of changing their country every week (on their profile pages only, of course), so the holidays system could be easily misused. That's why BrainKing support only Christmas (24th, 25th and 26th December) and New Year (1st January). If we add weekend days (2 days every week) and vacation days (up to 40 a year or even more if you renew the membership by at least 1 year), it makes a nice number of days off which should be suitable for everyone.

I have added a small improvement to the Discussion Boards page. When you visit this page, you should see a small frame at the page top, containing the most recent post of the selected board group (which is set to General BrainKing.com discussion by default). It is useful if you want to read something new but don't want to visit every single public board to find out which one has been updated the most recently.

Other details:

• The most recent post is picked from the boards according to your language filter setting. For example, if your option Show boards in this language (at the Discussion Boards page) is set to Portuguese, the post will be selected from BrainKing.pt and Fórum geral boards only.
• The post preview is reduced to max. 500 characters (if it is longer, the (more ...) link is added) and displayed in a smaller font, in order not to occupy to much page space.

There are more improvements to the discussion board system to be implemented, but it's always better to start with the simpler ones and test the overall performance first.

This entry belongs to the group of "BrainKing is an international site" articles, although it is related to an English-only tool. However, it is very useful especially for non-native English speakers (which doesn't mean that the other ones cannot use it as well).

There is a handy Firefox extension which is called Answers and it works as a context sensitive connector to the popular site Answers.com. When you install it and restart your Firefox browser, try to hold the Alt key and click on a word. You should get something similar to the attached picture where I am demostrating the usage on BrainKing's discussion boards page and the word "fellowship".

... and I am glad to say that its functionality has been tested several times by real users. Except a recent small bug (which has turned new Black Rooks to Brain Bishops for several minutes, now it's fixed), the process is straightforward and bug-free. That's a good thing because I believe that a Black Rook, especially with current 50% discount, is a good investment for everyone who wants to spend many years on our site and don't want to be bothered every year to renew the subscription.

The source.

By the way, would anybody be interested in a recurring payment support on BrainKing? For example, to place a Brain Bishop order only once and to be automatically charged 2 Euro every month on PayPal.

Since BrainKing is a game site, not a chat site, this entry it not too important but I always prefer to refer people to already posted answer than to send individual responses. Shortly said, I want to make clear who can do what on public or private discussion boards:

• Public boards - the boards which can be found on the Discussion Boards page. The main moderator of the board is responsible for the content and all complaints should be sent to him/her. The other moderators (if set by the main moderator) help the main moderator to maintain the board. The Global moderators can do the moderator work as well and change the main board moderator if necessary.
• Private boards - the fellowship or tournament boards. The main moderator - i.e. the Big Boss of the fellowship or the tournament creator - is responsible for the content. Global Moderators have no power here because the private boards are really private. It means that if something is wrong at a private board, no complaints should be sent to the global moderators.

And, as a general rule, Fencer does not with to be bothered with any kind of complaints which are related to any discussion board issues (unless they are of a technical kind).

Yes, it sounds like a funny advertisement, one of those which bother us on TV before Christmas - "this absolutely marvelous deal is the best option for a Christmas gift because the offer is limited" - and, after the announced deadline, it is, big surprise, extended by another month or two, because a customer expects it.

Not this time. The current Christmas Special Black Rook action on BrainKing is really the last one and the offer to get it with 50% discount will never appear again. Since the possibility to get a lifetime membership for a very reasonable price is kind of unique, I will repeat the instructions here:

1. Go to the Paid Membership page and follow the instructions at the "Christmas Special Black Rook action" red box. It will add 5 years of a Brain Rook level (which is equivalent to the half of the Black Rook level price) to your shopping cart.
2. When you place the order and BrainKing receives your payment, it will automatically add you to the Black Rook registry.
3. Then BrainKing will try to find another waiting user who has already paid in this action. If the search is successful, it will activate the Black Rook for you and the selected user.
4. If no waiting user is found, your Black Rook registry entry will be shown on that page and wait.
5. If your entry is not processed when the action is finished, you can choose if you want to get your money back or add 5 years of the normal Brain Rook level to your account.

The action will be automatically turned off as of 1st January 2007, 00:00:01 GMT+01:00. After that, there will be no other option to get a Black Rook but to pay the full price of 300 Euro with no exceptions.

There are several ways how to get a paid membership on BrainKing and one of them (the most recent one) is to post a request to the Pawn Registry. This feature allows you to let people know that you would like to have a higher membership level but cannot afford to pay for it, for any reason.

It is a good practice that a targeted request is always better than an anonymous one. The Pawn Registry offers a possibility to write a public message to the future sponsor which could increase the chance to get your request spotted. Moreover, the Paid Membership page now displays a randomly selected request from the Pawn Registry and the ones with a public message are always selected first.

It never fails. It doesn't matter what kind of a new feature is released, just when it is done, it is almost instantly required (or requested?) to implement an improvement. Actually, it's not a big surprise because one person can hardly test all possible combinations or situations which could appear when other users start to use the feature. Action and reaction.

The reaction is that the recently announced game filter on the Main Page can be turned off if someone does not play many games and has no reason to filter them, so it only occupies the page space.