BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

As we have promised yesterday, all annoying, popping, flashing, eyes hurting or mind boggling advertisements which could have been observed on BrainKing pages in the past (remember the "YOU ARE THE WINNER! CLICK HERE!" crap?) have been absolutely and totally removed from the site and should not bother anyone anymore, no matter what level of membership you have. We wanted to try them out and so we did, but the experiment is over and there is no point to deface our site(s).

Please let me know if there is something of this kind what I have forgotten to remove. We want to keep BrainKing clean at all costs.

By the way, I have found a McAfee SiteAdvisor report which says that BrainKing is a "green site" and it probably means that no adware, malware, spyware or any other bad ware has been found on our pages. A funny detail is that BrainKing has, as they claim, "a few users", but it may be right if they compare our number of registered accounts to, for instance, Google unique daily visitors.

After a long struggle with the registrations rules, the BrainKing.se domain is finally up and alive. Maybe I should make a chart of national domain registration processes, sorted by their difficulty. Anyway, who cares ... the result is what a user is interested in only.

http://BrainKing.se is the new entry point everyone who prefers to use BrainKing in the Swedish localization.

Regarding the third party banner ads which occasionally appear on BrainKing, it seems that the problem of bad advertising partners is more important than it seemed to be. In order to protect the BrainKing users from any possible threats of this kind, I have made the final decision to remove all advertisements which are not under our full control from all BrainKing pages tomorrow, instead of the end of this month. It really makes no sense to keep them, since they bring much more disadvantages than advantages (if any).

Happy 15th May to all.

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.

The new version of the popular VoIP (internet telephony) program Skype 3.2 has been recently released and one of the most innovative (?) features is the possibility to make PayPal payments directly in the Skype box. Well, it can be kind of convenient - when you are talking to a friend on Skype and want to send him some money, you don't need to switch to a web browser to do so. Furthermore, this improvement is not totally unexpected at all, because both Skype and PayPal are owned by eBay, so it's only logical that they want to integrate the important products into one platform.

The question is, does it mean anything for BrainKing payment system? I guess not because the Skype payment gateway is designed to make simple payments, just by specifying the payee's e-mail address and the amount to send, I see no possibility to redirect BrainKing's placed order to the Skype system. But if someone wants to try it out and use Skype to pay to fencer@brainking.com instead of clicking the Pay button on BrainKing, it won't be declined.

And, please, don't use Skype to call me - my headset is unplugged most of the time anyway.

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 don't get it. Why don't some people like a dragon fire which is so cute and harmless? But I am also pleased that many people like it. And if you belong to the other group, please don't forget that the dragon spits a fireball only once and it does not interfere with anything (permanently). Good news - I want to focus on some serious work now. The dragon should not be changed in the upcoming days/weeks.

After the success of icon and fellowship flag gallery, we have added a page of big user photos as well. The page might be a little longer but until there are serious complaints about it, there is no need to split it to shorter subpages.

And something kind of biased but not illogical at all - if you are not forced to do so by your employer company policy, I really recommend not to use Internet Explorer 6 because of many serious reasons. I have found more articles to this subject but it's not necessary to post all of them. Based on my personal experiences (and tests), Internet Explorer 7 is much better, faster, safer and more stable. Or, which is ever better, Firefox 2.0 or Opera 9.2.

Yes, I wanted to make this entry a little longer. When a bigger change is under development, it's not easy to write something meaningful about its progress.

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.

One of the most, uh, problematic drawbacks of a safe discussion board system is a big number of restrictions and rules which must be applied to make the system safe (i.e. with a proper content available for children, etc.). Of course, a typical user is demanding, pretentious and hard to please. Many people want to have much more public discussion boards than we currently have on BrainKing and they would be happiest if they are allowed to create them themselves. The question is, is it possible to keep it under control?

The answer is yes but not within the BrainKing site itself. The idea (originally not mine but it doesn't matter) is to reuse the BrainKing discussion board system and build a standalone site which would serve a sophisticated board system maintained by the users. Everybody would be able to create own public or private discussion boards of any topics and nobody could complain "hey, the BrainKing game site contains an unsafe board system, I won't allow my kids to play there" because the only thing it would have with BrainKing in common would be the list of user accounts - when you are registered on BrainKing, you can log in the discussion site without creating another one account.

The next question is, do we need it? It would solve the current "problem" of creating new fellowships only because of private discussions. The main purpose of fellowships should be game related (team matches, team tournaments, internal tournaments/ponds/stairs etc.).

Comments are welcome.

But I think we will do it anyway, sooner or later.

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.

It seems that I have completely forgotten to post a warning about the scheduled downtime of BrainKing sites accessibility because a quick lookup at my notepad reminds me that the action is already over. Well, since BrainKing shows no recent downtime period which would be longer than 1 hour, the server housing company has probably performed the announced hardware upgrade much faster than we have expected. In other words, everything is all right.

I would like to confirm that the blog system which is used for this BrainKing.info site (and the BrainRook.com one as well) will be replaced by our own solution soon because the recent increase of the blog site popularity is a good reason to make it better connected to the BrainKing game site resources and integrate both projects together. In fact, they will be still two separated sites working independently, but the possibility of sharing the rich set of BrainKing data will introduce many useful improvements which are not possible to use now.

And since the new blog system should support the same multilingual capabilities as the BrainKing game site does, it will be also possible to publish the blog entries in many other languages (if the translations are provided, of course). As the final consequence, the BrainKing.info should completely replace the current Server News page because it would make no sense to duplicate the information.

Back to work. It's a nasty rainy weather outside anyway.

I have just wanted to calculate the total number of all BrainKing features. And I have failed to do it, of course. Which reminds me, the BrainKing's Help page is still far from completing and until it is done, it would be really difficult to make a list of all features and count them.

Anyway, the features can be separated to three main categories:

• Core features - BrainKing cannot live without them and they make the fundamental set of the "must have" ones.
• Optional features - they usually add nice improvements to the overall BrainKing experience but it's not vitally important to use them and the majority of them are customizable through the Settings page.
• "It's totally useless at the first glance" features - this category contains visual effects which have no purpose but to draw the user's attention or make him annoyed.

Right, the Dragon belongs to the last category and the title of this entry has nothing to do with the adventure game of the same name. Like one smart person has already commented, every castle should have a dragon, which is the reason why it appears in the Castle style of BrainKing as well. Let me answer the most frequently asked questions:

• There is really no hidden functionality in the dragon. You can only watch it and admire its elegant and smooth flight.
• The dragon appears only in the Castle style. If you are using other styles, you should not see it at all.
• The dragon can fly in both directions which are chosen randomly on each page.
• The dragon never appears on the game pages, so nobody can complain that it would disturb him while playing or thinking about playing.
• The dragon works nice with Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9. For some strange reason, it is not animated on Internet Explorer 6, so it only moves horizontally without flapping the wings.

There are many good ideas which were originally based or similar visual effects and nobody knows what sort of useful improvement can be created out of it in the future. And if not, it's still a nice animation to see.

The world wide web is living on links and there would be no web without links. That's how the search engines work because the number of incoming links significantly influence the page rank and higher ranked pages get better positions in search results, although the page content is not always a masterpiece of a writer work. The idea is the king. For example, have a look at the World's Highest Website - there is absolutely no meaningful content but it shows a nice CSS trick to make a page which is almost 19 kilometres (deliberately and purposefully, I don't write about miles, yards, inches etc., because ... uh ... never mind) long. And since many other sites link to that page (including this blog), it's got an above-average Google PageRank 6/10. Nice work. The original idea pays off.

Speaking of that, I have noticed that BrainKing.info's page rank has been recently increased from 3/10 to 5/10 which means that 1) its content is not the worst, hopefully, and 2) there are some quality pages linking to us.

If you want to support us, please keep linking to BrainKing sites.

And something game related, for a change. Since the game notation column (on BrainKing game pages) can be quite long when the game is too long as well, I have added a new option Number of game notation lines to show to the Settings page. By default, it is set to all, but you can select an exact number of notation rows to display at once (1-20). It can also speed up the page loading a little, so don't hesitate to experiment with it.

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.