BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

• March 2006 - and here we have finally come to a problem to recall historical events because the regular monthly announcing of special actions had caused a lack of any other Server News entries. On the other hand, the History category of the blog is almost finished and since the blog itself contains much more detailed information about BrainKing related events, it is a better reference anyway.
  Never mind. The action of March 2006 was about the possibility of "everybody who purchases a new membership or extends the current one, can create a prize tournament with the same membership as the prize for a winner for free". As a consequence, many good prize tournaments had been created and many new users were aware of this interesting option to get a free membership.


• April 2006 - the special action of this month was very different to the previous ones because it introduced BrainKing's own system of online advertising. Everybody who purchased a new membership or extended the current one, could place a text advertisement to the right column to promote own site or any other favourite pages for free. The duration of showing this advertisement depended on the length and level of the purchased membership, of course, because who paid more, got a bigger bonus. The popularity of this event was disputable - not everyone likes to see advertisements, even if there were text only and very short. But, at least, we had tried something new and that's exactly what every successful site must do, in order to remain successful.
  Furthermore, we solved a long term problem of correct colors in some games. When BrainKing had been started, I thought that a white player was the one who started all games. It is not true, of course, and since the number of games on BrainKing became too high to keep ignoring this fact, we released a global fix for all affected game types. There was a little confusion when white pieces suddenly became black and vice versa, but since we had announced it in Server News in advance, people accepted it as a must-have improvement.
  Go and two variants (played on 9x9 and 13x13 boards) were added to BrainKing at last, this popular game had been requested many times in the past and now we are glad to have it. As a small bonus, the game Connect6 was implemented as well.


• May 2006 - it is nice when the rules of special action of the month come from someone else who suggests it and takes advantage of it at the same time. Thanks to that, the May 2006 action was about Black Rook membership (which never expires). Everyone, who purchased this membership, could choose another user who would receive the same membership for free. In other words, it was a 50% discount of this membership level and many users realized that it was really profitable for them.
  And we released the game Lines of Action too.

As a part of the new design tuning and bugfixing, I have added a style switcher feature to all newly designed pages. Simply find the links Castle and Simple next to To castle style at the top of the pages and when you click them, the style will be instantly changed without reloading the page. This function is equivalent to the View / Style menu at Firefox and Opera browsers (I guess that Internet Explorer does not have it yet) and since it's been added mostly for testing purposes, it does not save the last chosen style information anywhere. At least not now.

I have also seen some reactions to this design problematics and there is an interesting question whether the users could define their own stylesheets and share them with other users, as an addition to the official BrainKing's style repository. Well, I think it is a good idea because it's always better to have more options to choose from. If we combine the number of supported languages with the upcoming system of visual styles, BrainKing could become the most customizable game site ever created and everyone should be able to find the preferred configuration.

One more breakthrough - the list of unresolved bugs has been reduced to only one page (or three quarters of a page at this moment). It means that the improved bug tracking system was definitely worth creating.

Since the new BrainKing visual design is very close to its completion and release, I have made several important improvements which deserve to be described closely here. By the way, I am very pleased that the previous entry about the design has collected the most comments of the whole blog so far. Very good result. And the comments contain some interesting additional information, I recommend to read them if you haven't already done so.

• There are more pages which have been converted to the new style, I would like to highlight the archived game pages because they have the same structure as the open games pages which belong to the most frequently used parts of the BrainKing site. The design is not fully finished yet because I have had to combine some aspects of the current one and the new one due to a backward compatibility but it is just a temporary solution.


• I have added a link to simple style (and its alternative to castle style) to the top of all redesigned pages which are currently available (Bug Tracker, Help, Support Us, Links, archived games etc.), so it is very easy to switch between those two styles and compare the results. Please note that the simple one will replace the current BrainKing skin when the new design is finished and released. There is also a special WebTV skin but it is automatically activated when a WebTV compatible device is detected, so nobody who uses a normal web browser should worry about it.


• And now, the most important thing comes - since I have succeeded to put all visual attributes of the skins to the style layer (a css file), it is very easy to add any number of alternative skins which can contain pictures, fonts, margins, borders, anything you can think of. If you know how to create a web page style and want to customize BrainKing to your needs, don't hesitate to send me the css file and if it works with no errors and looks nice, I will be happy to add it to BrainKing's style repository. Just download the style created by me and replace the properties by your own choices.

I will probably add some comments to the css file to describe which line is for what but since the most important ones are already descriptive enough themselves, it might not be necessary. And if there is an intererest, we can create a contest of the best BrainKing skin created by our users.

• December 2005 - the Christmas Action of the year 2005 was started. Well, not a breakthrough of any kind, simply a free month to every new or extended membership, but which other game site did that as well? We also added a Froglet variant called Sphere Froglet It started an interesting discussion (or argument) about the difference between a sphere and a torus. Well, not all BrainKing users are mathematicians or know what a torus is, which was the main reason why I had decided to use the word "sphere" at the game title instead.


• January 2006 - January Action was annunced just after the December one and it was about 200 free Brains to each membership purchased during that month. But what is more important - it was the start of regular monthly actions. In other words, beginning January 2006, BrainKing offered a special action every month, and this trend was not stopped yet. We also added a Chinese and Italian localization of the site.


• February 2006 - BrainKing introduced single elimination and entry fee tournaments. The February action was created and everyone who ordered a membership had a 50% chance to get the same subscribed period for free. We were also forced to make a small increase of membership fees due to exchange rates (+ 2 Euro), otherwise it would become too disadvantageous to accept payments in any other currency except CZK. And, as a bonus, we released a system of team matches - a captain of a fellowship team could send a team challenge to another captain of another fellowship (of the same game type team) and play a team match, fully controlled and maintained by BrainKing.

A global change is always difficult to make because it usually affects everyone at once and a small defect can easily cause a storm of annoyed messages at my message box. Yes, I am talking about the announced new design of the BrainKing game site which is still under development and hasn't been officially released yet, but anybody can already test it. It is always the best practice to throw an unfinished product to the customers and observe their reactions.

Yes, I know that the bright orange headers are too bright!
I am sure it will be better in the final version.

You might have noticed that several BrainKing pages are already changed to the new design. I have deliberately chosen the less frequent ones which are not vitally important for playing games or posting to discussion boards:

• Bug tracker
• Links
• The Translator Tool (available for the translators only)
• The Main Admin Page (but it is accessible only for Liquid and me so it would make no sense to link to it from here)

It would be cool if we can get as many reactions and comments as possible, preferably here on this blog site. By the way, I have also implemented an automatic WebTV detection system, so if you are using this device, you should see the new design with almost no new graphics, in order to make it better displayed for you. It's a pity that we have to spend our time to create alternative (and bad looking) skins for devices which are not meant to browse the web seriously due to their awfully big amount of limitations and bugs.

One more improvement of the day - the Bug Tracker page now shows tooltips with the bug description previews when a mouse cursor is hovered over the bug number link.

• September 2005 - BrainKing's shopping cart system was implemented which allowed us to track all membership or other orders, keep a well arranged history and make the process of purchasing more subscriptions at once much easier. After a week or two, there was another BKR history recalculation due to a rounding error in the formula and the BKR values became accurate at last. It was also the time of releasing Capablanca Random Chess which replaced Gothic Chess (scheduled for a total removal) and another Chess variant, called Los Alamos Chess, was added (the first supported variant with 6x6 board). The total number of chess variants was set to 25.


• October 2005 - that month made an important milestone for Backgammon players because we added a doubling cube for Backgammon variants. It really pushed the Backgammon playing experience much further and enabled many new strategies to play this game.


• November 2005 - we introduced the Stairs system, an another system which sorts players by their skills, as an alternative to tournaments and BKR charts, similar to "Ladders" which were created on some other game sites. The number of BrainKing localizations was increased by two, thanks to the Russian and Spanish translators. And, as every year, a Christmas Action was announced - a free month to every new or renewed membership.

I have been adding new and new smileys to BrainKing and I have suddenly realized that the total number of them is 400. A nice one. I am sure that it could be enough for now and everyone can pick his favorite ones from this huge collection. Since the number of smileys is really high, I have been already asked to implement a smiley filter which would allow each user to display only selected smileys at the popup window. It is a good idea. However, several issues must be solved first. For example - is there a universal way to show any group of smileys at a box of a reasonable size, when the smileys themselves are of many different sizes?

The smileys.

By the way, I was told that several BrainKing users were confused when a double-underlined link suddenly appeared at the text they were reading (discussion board posts, game rules, bug reports etc.). Please, don't be afraid of it. It is just another way of contextual advertising (read more information here) and it makes no harm at all. Even if such links promote other game sites, feel free to visit them and find out that BrainKing is better anyway. And, of course, paying members have an option to turn them off completely, like any other advertisements on BrainKing.

The last line - I am very glad that I have recently added a search and filter form to the Bug Tracker page because it really makes the bug tracking work much easier and more convenient. One positive side effect is that I have successfully reduced the number of open issues to only 2 pages which contain mostly non-critical reports.

Since a new filter for the Bug Tracker has been released yesterday, I have realized that many bug reports are outdated or not valid anymore, some of other bugs were relatively easy to fix and something important was still missing. As a result, the Bug Tracker page is now even easier to use than before.

Short summarization:

• About 10-20 bug reports have been resolved today and the list of the remaining ones is much more relevant to the current situation. I like a simplicity.
• A search field has been added to the filter. Now you can find all bug reports which contain a selected keyword in their titles or descriptions (or both). It is very useful if you want to report a bug but you want to check if it is not already reported by anyone else. Which is a recommended procedure anyway.
• Game invitation messages are not lost anymore, you will find them at the game message archive. Since this improvement has required a change in the database, it is applied for new game invitations only.

And it is nice to see that there are no unresolved Priority 1 bugs.

This day has been a bug fixing day. Or the day of the Bug Tracker cleaning, more like. If you ever reported a bug on BrainKing, you have probably noticed that the list of bugs was not well organized and it was very difficult to find a particular bug report. So I have decided not only to close bugs which are already resolved or fix some minor things, but to improve the Bug Tracker page as well.

There is a new filter at the top of the Bug Tracker page which allows you to select several parameters to narrow the results, in order to show only bugs you are interested in. By default it shows only unresolved bugs, i.e. the ones with New or Open status. It is also possible to list all bugs reported by a selected user - simply click the show this user reports link at the particular bug page.

I have also added (two days ago) a template system for tournaments. If you have a Brain Rook or higher membership level and create tournaments frequently, you might find the new option Save as template next to the Create button useful, because it allows you to save the current set of tournament options and reuse it later by a single click. It works for both public and private (for fellowship members) tournaments.

The database is the heart of BrainKing. Nothing works without the database and if the database is down, the whole site is down as well. This is the reason why the database server must be as fast as possible, contain as many RAM as possible etc.

According to that, we have decided to add 2 more GB to our database server RAM and you might have noticed an hour downtime of BrainKing this morning when we have tried to install it. For some reason, the system refused to start up, so we have removed the new RAM and restarted it with the former configuration, in order to make the site alive as soon as possible.

After some explorations, we have finally found out a solution to this problem and since installing a new hardware requires to turn off the server for a while (no, we still don't have a hot-swap system although it would be nice to own it ), there will be one more downtime today, most likely as of 17:00 - 18:00 p.m. GMT+01:00. And since the timeout checker daemon is already turned off, this event should not cause any game related problems.

Thanks for understanding.

I have been told a displeasing news today - many people would like to comment the blog entries but they don't because they don't want how to do it.

Hmmm. It's a really bad thing because the main purpose of the blog is to let people express their opinions about the current news or events. It is the best feedback we can have.

All right, since it has become a serious problem, I have finally made an irreversible decision to create my own blog system which would fit all our criteria. There are several advantages of our specific solution:

• People will not need to register a new account to use all blog functions because I can easily connect it to the BrainKing's table or registered users. In other words, who is registered on BrainKing.com, will be able to log in BrainKing.info as well.


• It will allow us to take advantage of the BrainKing's rich source of board game data and information. For example, it should be easy to include a live tournament table to a blog entry. Such dynamic aspects could make it more interesting to read.


• When a system level problem occurs, we will be able to fix it ourselves instead of contacting the blog system authors and waiting for a new release of their product.


• I like to develop own products instead of reusing third party ones and trying to read other programmer's mind.

I won't announce any deadline or release date. When it is done, it is done.

I hope that Backgammon players and enthusiasts will forgive me if I have omitted some details I am not aware of, but since I am not too familiar with it, it is possible that I haven't made it 100% bug free, especially when I was not able to find this format documentation anywhere on the web. I am talking about the mat format support for Backgammon games, which can be used to export any Backgammon games to a text format and import it to a Backgammon software which can read the mat files.

If you open a Backgammon (or variant) game page, you should see a new link download MAT code at the notation column. Feel free to experiment with it.

Paying members, who prefer to use PayPal as the payment gateway, already know that BrainKing can detect a successful payment and automatically activate all membership subscriptions contained in the order. It is a great and the fastest way to upgrade your membership level because it takes only several seconds to finish the whole process without our invervention. However, if a user pays for a non-standard order or specify the order details at the message to us, it can be one of the rare situations when a manual processing could be preferred. That's why the option Select if you want us to process it manually has been added and if it is used, BrainKing's automatic payment processing system won't be activated for this order.

I hope that nobody expects to see big changes on BrainKing during weekends, especially on Sunday. As I am used to, it is a day of thinking about the work instead of doing it, downloading security updates, upgrading an antivirus software and, of course, doing some totally non-computer things as well.

Occasionally we produce a couple of small improvements to the site:

• Random color invitations - there is a new option random at the Your color combobox when you create a new game invitation. Its purpose is obvious, the colors of opponents (i.e. who will start the game) are not set immediately but randomly chosen when the invitation is accepted.


• Notepad categories are displayed with numbers of contained notes now. The Notepad system is available for paying members only.


• Game invitation message preview - the list of non-public game invitations (on your Main Page) highlights the ones containing a message from the invitor by an asterisk (*). Paying members have an option to hover the mouse cursor over it and see the message preview popup. It is useful if you want to accept more invitations at once but don't want to miss the messages without visiting each invitation separately.


• We have a new Black Rook member since yesterday. The total number of Black Rooks is 77.


• It would make me happy if people write more comments to the blog entries or start discussions here. Should I make a prize contest for that?

We think that there is no BrainKing problem which could not be solved, easily or hardly. The most usual source of a problem is the problem report itself because many people tend to tell us only that something is wrong and then we have a hard time to find out what exactly is the report about. I think it cannot hurt to summarize it again:

• If there is a problem with a game, give us the game ID. It can be found below the game board.
• If there is a problem with a user account, give us the user ID. It can be found on the Profile page.
• If there is a problem with a tournament or team match, give us the tournament/match URL. Simply copy and paste the address from the location bar of your browser. I know it is not the best solution, I will add this kind of the ID information to the corresponding pages soon.
• Always add information about the browser you use. It is very important.

And enjoy the new smileys:

Just after the new auto pass feature has been released for backgammon games, we have realized that the creator-opponent agreement system does not solve this problem in tournaments, team matches and stairs. That's why the following solution has been added today:

• There is a new section on Settings / Game Filter page which contains all games where the auto pass can be used (currently backgammon variants only).
• If you select one or more games at this section, it means that you agree to use auto pass in events where the games are created automatically (tournaments etc.).
• When such game is to be generated, the system checks if both players of the game have this option set. If so, the game is created to use auto pass.
• Standard game invitations still contain the agreement checkbox but it is pre-filled by a value based on these settings.

Now, this is more important. As you probably know, a new design of BrainKing is being developed and is almost finished (click here for a preview). It is compatible with all major web browsers and continuously tested with Firefox 2.0, Internet Explorer 7.0 and Opera 9.0. However, I have just downloaded a WebTV emulator seen that this device probably follows its own rules to render the pages - in other words, the result is terrible. There seems to be no way to have a nice and modern design which could be displayed by WebTV as well.

Please, if it is possible for you (at least a little), don't visit BrainKing with WebTV and start to use a normal computer. I have checked the database and found out that WebTV users make less than 0.5% of all BrainKing users and it is not worth spending too much time to explore what to change, what to add or what to remove from the new design. I will probably create an alternative style of BrainKing's new pages to be better viewed by minor devices, but there users will definitely miss a huge amount of new visual features and other neat aspects of a modern design.