BrainKing Knowledge Base

I like to read profiles of BrainKing users and not only because I have to approve all changes to them. There are creative users who are capable of turning a text and our set of smileys to a real art and it is a pleasure to observe it. And it is also a useful thing because we have already implemented several improvements after reading profile descriptions.

For example, people used to write "please do not invite me to chess games" but not everyone understands English or wants to comply with it, so we have created the game invitations filters.

And today is no exception. Instead of writing "please do not invite me to your fellowship", simply go to the Settings page, find the new option Allow other users to send fellowship invitations and turn it off.

It is a feedback that works. Don't be afraid to post more.

I hope the title of this entry is not misleading - it does not mean that BrainKing would feature a graphic editor to create your own smileys with no limits. The feature of the day is about the possibility to display only those smileys (in the popup window) you really want to use, instead of searching through 10 pages to find the desired one.

All pages where smileys can be entered to a text (discussion boards, move submit forms, Notepad, ...) now contain a new link Change smileys which points to the Settings / JavaScript page, presenting a new section called Your selection of smileys. Simply use the Add smileys, Delete, Move left, Columns and other options of the editor and build your own smiley set. Don't forget to select Activate user smileys checkbox before saving the settings and never be bothered with smileys you are not interested in anymore.

Well, as I have written yesterday, I have re-organized the Settings page in order to make a free space for this smiley improvement, but since I have finally decided to put it to the JavaScript section (where it logically belongs to), it haven't been necessary at all.

And, as all JavaScript enhancements, it is available to paying members only.

I have read an interesting article today about countries which apply some kind of a censorship to the content of web pages or search engines results, when their citizens wants to access a certain type of sites. Well, it is not a revelation of the day because the internet censorship has been existing for many years (as the article days, the most affected countries are China, Iran, Myanmar and Vietnam) but, what is more alarming, the total number of such countries has increased to 25 and most likely it is not the total final number.

Good news is that BrainKing doesn't seem to belong to the "black list" of forbidden sites because our geo-targeting database confirms that BrainKing is being visited by users from all countries, including the mentioned ones.

All except Cuba but it is a different problem and I don't think there can be anything done about it. Maybe another revolution could help.

The meaning of this entry is to highlight the difference between the real censorship and the moderation of BrainKing's discussion boards which is occasionally criticised by displeased users who had experienced a post deletion or a discussion board ban. BrainKing, as any other public site, has its rules and since every user is obliged to follow the User Agreement, the rules are valid for everyone. The purpose of the moderation and its consequences is not to make a censorship but to maintain the friendly feeling of BrainKing, especially when it is open to all countries and all nationalities. I would like to thank everybody who understands this point and does not take a moderator's event as a personal attack. And I am glad to say that the majority of BrainKing users belong to the "good" category.

I have just noticed that the number of registered users from Turkey is a little bigger than the one of Czech users, which means that the second biggest national community of BrainKing users is Turkish. Very nice. I know the number of registered accounts is not absolutely equivalent to the number of active ones but at least it reflects the progression of several recent months.

Regarding the languages, I have also implemented the final solution to avoid language flags misclicks which usually lead to the "the site is in some strange foreign language now, help!" situations. Since now, if you click a flag which represents a supported language (at the right column of the Castle style), you must confirm the change at a simple page which shows a short information about the current and new language. I hope that nobody will accidentally change the site localization anymore.

The last small improvement of the day is an addition of the Languages link to the left menu column (the Information section). Since there is no "more about languages" link at the new design, as it used to be before, new users are not aware of this page and it would be a pity to leave it buried and unnoticed. Now it's easily accessible, no matter which style you are using.

BrainKing offers six methods to make a payment when you want to purchase a membership (and as I can see now, the list of payment options is not accessible until you add something to the shopping cart, which is bad and it must be solved soon). I guess it should be sufficient, especially when 99% orders go through PayPal or local bank transfers. However, as we are opening to more markets as a direct result of adding more BrainKing localizations and domains, the number of users who would like to get a paid membership but cannot use any of the provided payment methods is growing as well.

When I make a quick lookup on Google, the list of companies offering online payment systems or credit card gateways is not short, so why don't we use all of them?

• Expenses - unlike PayPal or MoneyBookers, the majority of alternative systems to accept online payments would charge us a one-time setup fee (usually in hundreds of USD) or regular monthly fees, no matter if there were any transactions on our behalf or not. There is no point to pay for something which might not be used at all.


• Administration - it can be quite difficult and time consuming to maintain a well arranged and understandable list of 20 different online payment providers, when every single of them can have a specific policy or rules and there is always a risk that they will freeze your account for no apparent reason (which is what had happened to us with Swreg.org 3 years ago). Less is better in this case.

By the way, I have been asked by several Russian players if we plan to support Yandex payment system on BrainKing. It's not a bad idea (if it brings more paying members from Russia) but my knowledge of Russian language is not what it used to be and I didn't find if the site contains an English version as well. Is there someone who speak Russian and English/Czech and could lead me through it?

The title should not invoke a heretical idea of "this blog is useless as well", or at least I hope so. It is about "you can become the next internet millionaire!" sort of garbage which is nothing but one of many tricks of so called online marketing gurus which create tons of automatically generated blogs under many different domains, in order to convince unexperienced webmasters to buy their overpriced software which promises to increase the target user's pay-per-click advertising revenue by 300% in a week or even more.

All right, I had to say that, although it's not following the main theme of the BrainKing blog. But I still read some of the mentioned "blogs" because it's interesting to know how the tricks to fool people must evolve along with the online advertising market evolution. I hope the search engines will evolve as well and filter out as many sites with automatically generated content (which is stolen from other pages in many cases and mixed down to create "original pages") as possible from the search results. Who wants to search for a meaningful content and land on a page which contains NOTHING but a couple of advertisements which say "I hope you are one of the idiots who will accidentally click me because that's the only purpose of this page"?

Being disgusted by all of this and following our promise, we have recently removed even more third party provided advertisements from BrainKing. By the end of May 2007, all ads which are not under our full control will be destroyed, burned, buried and forgotten.

A quantity does not have to be equivalent to a quality but occasionally it can make a good overview of certain statistical data. Just out of curiosity, I have made a simple exploration of my home mirror of the BrainKing database and listed the top 50 players who made the biggest number of game moves since the very beginning of BrainKing. The result is not a big surprise at all. But it is still worth adding to the Statistics page because the data are separated by months (left column) or added up to the total values (right column) and the page also shows your own data if you didn't make it to the top chart, just to compare them with others.

Again - no consequences should be made out of these lists and I don't plan to create any contest based on records of this kind. It is just, uh, another page of use(ful|less) information.

By the way, if you view the mentioned Statistics page today (the date of this entry), the total values might be not accurate yet because the calculation process can take up to several hours. Everything should be updated and synchronized within a day or two (or a little more).

I want to answer this question once and forever - the dragon, as the newest improvement of the Castle theme of BrainKing, is flying at the top of the page because I have programmed to do so and it's under our control. It doesn't mean that BrainKing has been infected by a virus, hijacked, hacked, cracked, wormed, trojanhorsed, timebombed, nothing bad is going on here. I know that users who don't read the blog will send me the same question over and over, but at least I can redirect them to this entry now.

Just relax and enjoy its nice and smooth flight. And it doesn't spit a fire yet!

There are game sites which automatically create official site tournaments on a regular basis. On the other hand, they don't allow users to create they own tournaments, which is one of the BrainKing's big advantages.

The question of the day is: Should we add an automatic official tournament system as well? Actually, it's a very easy thing to do, but I am not sure if BrainKing really needs it.

I remember that I wrote about an idea to create a BrainKing's Firefox extension several months ago, which would work as a simple notifier about the number of games to make a move or number of new messages without a need to open BrainKing in the browser window. Although some people replied with an interest to code such a tool, it seems that nothing has been finished (or even started?) so far.

I don't blame anybody, of course. It just makes me think if the structure of Firefox extensions is not too complicated to create a simple extension (or it's called add-on in Firefox 2.0) in a day or two, or a documentation for developers is not clear enough, which was my own experience with this technology two years ago. Anyway, the idea is not buried or declined.

Meanwhile, why not to try some other technologies? I have already started to play with Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets and it seems to be much simplier and easier to understand (just a simple HTML with some JavaScript), so I guess we could have a BrainKing gadget for Windows Vista later this month. Please don't get me wrong - this article is not to promote Windows Vista or push our users to upgrade their computers now. But if nothing else, it's one more way to promote BrainKing, and that's always a good thing.

I like to play with JavaScript tricks and one of my favourite ones is the popup window containing the first 30 games to make a move. Its advantage is obvious - you can easily choose which game to play, no matter which BrainKing page you are currently viewing, because the list is activated by moving the mouse cursor over the red number next to the Main Page link. The only disadvantage - the feature is available for paying members only.

And since many people prefer to play games with Fischer's Clock time control first, the popup list now displays such games highlighted by a bold font, so they cannot be overlooked. It's just a small improvement but I find it useful.

We encouraged our users to get a lifetime membership (Black Rook) many times in the past, created a couple of special actions but never addressed an interesting problem - when a Black Rook member uses all vacation days and the counter drops to 0, he cannot renew the membership by another year to reset the vacation counter, just like "normal" paying members can do. It is kind of demotivative, huh? But what about this - if a Black Rook buys a year or longer membership for another user, the number of his own vacation days left will be increased by the corresponding number of vacation days of the purchased membership. For example, if a Black Rook member has 2 vacation days left and buys a 1 year Brain Knight membership for someone else, BrainKing will add 25 vacation days to his account and he will have 27 total days left when the transaction is completed.

There are two small restrictions:

• The vacation days are added only if it is a "real" (money) purchase. When a membership is bought using Brains, it doesn't work.
• The total number of vacation days left cannot exceed the maximum value of 45.

This feature is Black Rook only. No other users can take advantage of it.