BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Our family of BrainKing national domains has a new increase. Thanks to our Estonian friends, we were able to register the BrainKing.ee domain and use it as an entry point of Estonian version of BrainKing. Well, this company is still leading the race but we cannot be the best at everything.

• http://BrainKing.ee

Following a recent request of a Black Rook member, I have implemented prize ponds, which make an equivalent of prize tournaments. The system is the same - when someone creates a prize pond, this pond will not be started until the prize is send to us, in order to ensure that the winner will receive it even if the pond creator leaves the site before the pond is finished. The prize ponds are highlighted by a bold font at the pond list page.

And, since an automatic system of sending the tournament and pond prizes is not finished yet, I have added a PayPal donate button to the Support Us page, so it can be used to pay for a prize (which is usually a free membership). And for other purposes as well.

• September 2004 - since the summer holidays are only in summer, there were no important news in August 2004. But September was a month of real richness, regarding the number of games supported on BrainKing. Let me summarize it - Jarmo, Alquerque, Froglet, Espionage, Jungle, Cylinder Chess, Amazon Chess, Berolina Chess, Anti Froglet, Spider Linetris, Small Espionage and Fast Espionage - that makes 12 new games in one month. This record was not broken so far (although the January 2007 release was very close to it) and simply means that we are never fully satisfied and want to improve our game site continuously.


• October 2004 - we developed a new system of timeout calculation because the former one (a heritage of BrainKing 1.0) was slowing down the site too much. Since this new system required an automatic synchronization process (to show the time left values correctly), it made several users confused. Fortunately, not for a long time. The second improvement of that month was the release of BKR graphs for paying members, after generating the tables of historical values, based on all finished games since October 2002 when BrainKing had been launched.


• November 2004 - there was a major failure of the database server, so we had to move the database itself to the application server and temporarily run everything on only one machine. After a day, everything was back to normal. Although system failures are not too rare and usually not worth mentioning in the history, this one was significant because it was the only event (so far) which helped me to make Liquid write the news entry himself. And I guess that it will not happen again because he seems to prefer to work, instead of talking about the work.

I have added a new (and long awaited) feature for fellowships yesterday. If you go to the Ratings page, you should see a couple of new links Players | Teams at the page top. These links separate the ratings page to two sections and the second one is what this article is about. In other words, BrainKing has a rating system for fellowship teams at last.

The formula to calculate BKR is the same as for classic BKR for players (so a team must finish at least 4 matches to get a BKR), but instead of game results of team participants, the whole team results are used and they are taken from both team tournaments and simple inter-fellowship team challenges. And although this feature is not fully finished, speaking of integrating to more parts of the site, it already provides BKR graphs with the rating history, and lists of top ratings and positions at the fellowships pages.

By the way, if a fellowship does not finish a team match of the particular game in 12 months, it disappears from the BKR chart, in order to filter out inactive teams which could occupy the top positions forever.

And, as a bonus, I have added a batch of new smileys:


Enjoy.

• May 2004 - hey, what about February, March and April? Since the news archive shows no logs during this time range, it was probably fully spent by developing the announced BrainKing 2.0 application. Based on a brand new framework (created by me as well), it was promising many new functions, much better performance and scalability, and similar neat features. We had announced the Big Release for the beginning of June 2004 and performed final tests, with a help of some volunteer testers. By the way, I wanted to get a name for the framework but couldn't think of anything meaningful, so it was left nameless. The only possible advantage would be if someone wants to build his own site based on BrainKing engine but I don't expect it happen.


• June 2004 - right, we had released the BrainKing 2.0. After several minutes we had turned it off and started to investigate what is wrong. Simply said, it was consuming too many system resources because of some forgotten infinite loop or deadlock in the code. After detailed exploring I had pinpointed the problem source and decided to relaunch the former BrainKing 1.0 for one more week, just to have enough time to fix the bug once and forever.
  After three weeks, the BrainKing 2.0 was launched again. That time it was a success and BrainKing 1.0 application could be thrown to a virtual trash bin. And, as a side effect, three new games had been released - Amazons, Battleboats Plus and Dark Battleboats.


• July 2004 - since there were no more critical issues with the newly released BrainKing 2.0, we could focus on a development of new features. During July 2004 we had added BrainKing Store where people could purchase BrainKing t-shirts, the very first Team tournament (in backgammon), the first version of User Agreement (containing rules for all BrainKing users) and the Bug Tracker to allow users to report bugs and track their status.

I have subscribed to ClustrMaps+ which is a better version of the classic and free ClustrMaps. The main advantage of this upgrade (a 2 years subscription for only 17.99 USD) is that the map of visitors can be zoomed to show continent details. Click on the map preview at the right column of this page (or if you are reading this via RSS, go to the blog site first), then click on Europe or America or Asia etc. Nice, isn't it? I hope this cool service will be improved in the future (e.g. showing city names as tooltips when a mouse cursor is hovered over a red circle) because I always like to support products like this one.

I have also removed the Google Analytics code from the sources of this site. It is likely that nobody noticed that because the code is not visible to a visitor and works only in background. But since we have our own statistics system and now we can take advantage of the upgraded ClustrMaps service, it is not necessary to use this Google tool anymore (not to mention that I never learned how to get some useful information out of it).

As the Paid Membership page says, the Brain Bishop membership can be purchased only as a monthly subscription, because its main purpose is to make the advantages of a paid membership accessible to people who cannot afford to spend more than 2 Euro a month. However, as many users already noticed and reported, it does not work as a real subscription because after the subscribed month is over, the user has to place another order to extend the membership by another month. It is not much convenient.

Don't panic! The solution is here. You can find this new PayPal Subscribe button on the Paid Membership page, just at the Brain Bishop section, below the level description. Since the recurring payments work in other way than the normal ones, the BrainKing's shopping cart is not used here. Instead, simply click the subscribe button and you will be redirected to our PayPal payment page where you can complete the transaction. And when it is done, you will be automatically charged 2 Euro every month, until you cancel the subscription at your PayPal account.

And, of course, this feature can be used to buy the Brain Bishop subscription for another user as well. Just go to the selected user's Profile and click the buy a membership for this user link.

The last thing - let's test how many people read the blog entries to the end of the articles. The first 20 paying members use this new method to buy the Brain Bishop subscription for a friend (who is not a paying member at the time of the purchase), will receive 1 month extension to their own membership level for free.

In order to improve our options to make a payment on BrainKing, I have just added a new method called PayPay, which can be an alternative to the MoneyBookers one because it allows to make a local bank transfer with minimal fees. Or, at least, that's how it should work. It would be great if a volunteer makes a small order, just to test the quality of this payment possibility.

The PayPay option seems to be a good opportunity especially for users from Slovakia, as far as I could hear from people who are already using this system. Well, we will see. Everybody is welcome to check it out.

• November 2003 - of course, the reason of missing news for the previous two months is obvious - there was a big system crash which had destroyed all database records of more than a month history (or more than two months?). We, we were given a lesson that no security was high enough. A good consequence was that BrainKing's system of security and backup had been improved on several levels and simply makes a similar event impossible to happen again. We had also replaced some damaged parts of the database server and made the system much more stable (after a week of total downtime). Remember, it was still the first version of BrainKing which had turned out to be based on an ineffective code, as a result of lack of my former experiences.


• December 2003 - the site was recovered (as much as it could be) and the process of rewriting the source code (and preparing BrainKing v2.0) was started behind the scene. As far as I remember, no other important events had occured.


• January 2004 - the New Year had started with a timeout bug which had made my New Year celebration quite operative because I had had to restore several tens of wrongly timeouted games and disable the timeout checker for a while. Luckily, I was online when it happened. As, as many important issues, this one cannot happen again because the timeout system was fully rewritten as well.

Several days ago I have realized that the Google PageRank of BrainKing.com site has increased from 5 to 6 (out of 10). Which is a good news because it is another side effect of the growing popularity of our site. For those, who are not familiar with PageRanks - they are used to determine the particular site importance in search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). And, of course, more people will find your site if your PageRank is higher then the one of other (competing) sites. The accuracy of these values is disputable but it's just how the search engines work and since many people use them, it's important to know it.

As an instant consequence, I have added a PageRank meter to the BrainKing's Login Page and, full of enthusiasm, I have implemented my own PageRank checker (for any site or page) and added it to our Search Page. The strange thing is that it shows a different behavior when used on my test environment (where it works correctly), while the "live" version decreases the results by 1 (or uses some outdated version of the PageRank database for an unknown reason).

BUT! There is one more important event of this day. Since I like the international nature of our site very much, I have decided to make it even more international and registered several new domains:

• BrainKing.de - Germany
• BrainKing.sk - Slovakia
• BrainKing.es - Spain
• BrainKing.hk - Hong Kong

These specific domains represent the corresponding BrainKing localizations (German, Slovak, Spanish and Chinese - Hong Kong is used because BrainKing.cn is already taken) and they could give us a boost in the particular local search engines.

More to come.

The amount of 40,000 registered users on the BrainKing.com game site has been exceeded yesterday. Yes, I know the simple number is not too important but it is a nice thing anyway. And since we expect that this number will continue to grow (and faster), several important improvements (related to this fact) are being prepared at the same time. If nothing goes wrong, they should be finished and released during this February.

Some more statistics - after releasing the January batch of new games, the number of started games (at the same time) is alternating around the value of 95,000 and I am sure that another new game release could increase it to one hundred thousand. But it is really not necessary now.

Many BrainKing users who are more active than an average player (which simply means that apart playing games, they post to discussion boards, ask questions and expect clear answers ), well, after some time, some of these users reach a boundary which could be called I want to be important and taken seriously!. It's not a bad thing, of course, and it is closely related to feature requests, bug reports and new feature comments. And although BrainKing is full of smart people who understand that there are many things with different priorities to do, this article should provide a short overview of the things behind the scene, hidden to a normal user, and answer The Question My feature request is really simple, why it is not implemented even after two weeks?
This is the list (and I have probably forgotten something, as usual):

• Back-end processes - regular tasks which affect all users and if something goes wrong, they must be addressed as soon as possible. This point includes:
  • BrainKing Daemons - the parts of the code which finish timeouted games, activate the automatic vacation, start tournaments or ponds, deactivate expired memberships, recalculate BKR chart positions, and the Main Deamon which maintain the others and check if all of them are alive and working.
  • Global database operations - the continuous replication of the data (it is a fail-safe system which ensures that even if the main database server crashes and destroys all stored data, the backup server always contains the mirror of the current database content, so it would be easy to restore it after a damaged hardware is replaced), regular backups (as an addition to the replication, a full backup of the database is performed every day and stored on several safe places, so even if both main and backup database servers collapse at the same time, there will be The Rescue Disk to get the yesterday's snapshot), etc.
  • Automatic failure detection - no system is error free and there can be always circumstances which make it frozen and not responding at all, the fail-safe system is able to recognize such situation and make a quick restart.


• Performance tuning - application and database related. They must be continuously monitored and when a part of the code (either Java or SQL) suddenly starts to behave strangely, it must be investigated immediately. No database works fast forever, proper changes must be made occasionally. And before a change to the code is released, it must be thoroughly tested because it usually affects more parts of the application. Moreover, unlike big companies, which can afford to use tens of ultra fast and powerful servers (and having performance problems anyway), we still live with just 2 (two) machines at all. Making the most out of it is an example of Liquid's masterpiece.


• Security issues - when a security hole in a third party product is found and published, a patch or a new version must be installed ASAP. And tests must be performed first. It is not a rare situation because all products have bugs and nobody can discover them all at once. Although it would be nice and save us from many problems.


• New technology exploration - technology news must be continuously monitored and possible patterns of applying them (to improve the site) must be considered.


• Communication with prospective partners - we don't live on membership fees only, new ways of funding (or payment methods) must be searched for. Negotiations with advertisers, etc.


• Development of administrator tools - these tools are not visible to BrainKing users but vitally important for a precaution of possible problems. The site is more and more complex, the administrator tools must be better and better.

The bottom line - if you feel like being ignored, we are probably solving one or more of the points mentioned above. Besides this, I have another full time job since October 2006, for personal reasons. But it won't last forever.

Well, I know that BrainKing is popular and people like it, but the response to the February Action which has been announced yesterday has exceeded all our expectations. Since 11 users have extended their membership levels by 2 years so far, the first part of the action is over. Unbelievable. But great.

There are still nine slots left for the second part (6 free months), so who is fast, can get half a year of free membership, which is a good offer as well. Don't miss it. And since the bonus game ArchMage has been officially released, I will send the download links to everybody who fulfills the criteria of the February Action's third part as soon as possible.

There are also some new records, regarding our BrainKing sites. This blog site BrainKing.info has exceeded 51,000 unique visitors in January 2007 (is it possible for a simple blog?) and our main game site BrainKing.com has crossed a boundary of 71,000 unique visitors in the same month. Records are broken again, mostly thanks to the big amount of new games on BrainKing during January 2007. And BrainKing will have 40,000 registered users very soon.

Although I have described the action at the Server News of BrainKing, it cannot hurt to post it here as well, especially when I can add a happy note that three nice people have already taken advantage of it. The details follow:

Well, we are going to give something for free in February because we think it is a good idea:

The first ten users who purchase at least two years of any kind of a paid membership (or renews the current one by at least two years) will receive one year of the same level for free.

The second ten users who purchase at least two years of any kind of a paid membership (or renews the current one by at least two years) will receive six months of the same level for free.

And everybody (including those who take advantage of the mentioned offers) who purchases at least a year of any kind of a paid membership (or renews the current one by at least another year) will receive a full retail version of ArchMage, a new game by 300AD.com, which is to be released within several days. The game would be available in both PC and Mac versions.