BrainKing Knowledge Base

Unlike round robin tournaments, the single elimination ones have a specific rule, regarding the initial seeding of the participants. Since the BrainKing's Help page contains no detailed description about this problematics and there are people who seem to be confused when they play with a top rated opponent in the first round (which usually means a sure loss and an elimination at the very start), let me post a short enlightment (by the way, why doesn't Firefox spell checker know the word "enlightment"?).

The point is that the top players should not meet one another before the last rounds, when only 4 or 8 non-eliminated players remain in the tournament, in order to make the finish more interesting. Otherwise, if the best players play in the first or second round, at least the half of them would have been eliminated and there would be no doubt who wins the last round. For example, if we order the players by their BKR and give 1 to the top one, 2 to the second one etc., the ideal form of the last rounds should be 1-4 3-2 or 1-8 5-4 3-6 7-2.

And because my explanation could easily explain absolutely nothing, please have a look at this page as well.

Right, it is a small improvement to the recent improvement because, whether we like it or not, fellowship members rarely visit the particular fellowship page and read the corresponding private discussion boards much more often.

So, as one or two people have already suggested, I have added the link Waiting games to the top of these discussion boards as well. It is displayed only if there are some public game invitations within the fellowship and the link is highlighted by a red number next to it, showing the current number of invitations.

Nobody has been trying to hack us today. I am disappointed. Maybe we should announce a big prize for the first hacking guru who successfully breaks in and we don't even notice that. Or maybe not.

The BrainKing's vacation system can save your games even if you don't plan any holidays but suddenly cannot access the web and play before a timeout occurs. It is called automatic vacation and everybody knows this feature (or at least many paying members because nobody else can use it). However, this kind of salvation does not work if you start a game with no days off vacation type, and since there are still many users who don't fully understand all possible types of time control (although we have a nice article on BrainRook site), maybe the particular game invitations (and tournamets) should have this time control much better highlighted and enhanced by a longer description (and possible consequences).

But the point of this entry is different. I have seen an interesting system on another site, which allows a user to give another user an access to his account (limited and temporary). This is how it works:

• A user (Player) marks another user (Friend) as his agent/delegate/substitute/representative/proxy/assistant - what is the correct word for this?
• Friend can login to the Player's account with Player's user name and Friend's password.
• After a pre-defined time period is over (usually a couple of days), the Friend's access to Player's account is disabled and cannot be reactivated in the next 30 days (or something like this).

In order to prevent a panic, nothing like that is planned for BrainKing. At least until a balanced and useful version of this idea is worked out and we are sure that we really need it.

Although I am sure that BrainKing is easy to use and many fundamental features are easy to learn even for novice players, it is an undoubtful fact that not all parts of the site are intuitive enough to be understandable at the first glance. And one of the possible reactions to such situations is to click the Contact Us link and send us a question.

It is a wrong approach. BrainKing administrators are usually too busy to send instant responses because their main job is to keep the site alive, up to date and evolving. Furthermore, we don't understand all 20 supported languages, which means that there are questions we cannot answer even if we stop doing everything else. The much better target to ask for a help is the BrainKing community.

BrainKing has a mature system of public discussion boards, which are moderated by experienced users and thanks to the worldwide concept of the site, there is always someone who is reading the boards and can answer much faster than us. If you have a problem or a question, please don't hesitate to post it to the proper board. In 99% cases you will get a response. The Discussion Boards page is organized by topics and languages, so it should be pretty easy to find the right place, whatever the problem is about.

I would not write about it again (I think there was a similar article in the past) but it cannot hurt to remind the facts, especially after answering 15 questions of this kind today. Yes, the Help page will be finished, later this year.

Many unexperienced players don't understand the basic aspects of Go strategy and think that the main goal of the game is to capture as many opponent's stones as possible (we provide the rules, of course, but I am sure there are people who don't read them). This is wrong and usually leads to endless games where more and more stones appear on the board, along with increasing number of the captured ones. And, which is even more complicated, when the situation requires to mark and accept dead stones, the players who don't know the purpose of it tend to rejecting thedead stones offer and it means that the game could really never end.

Since the algorithm of detecting dead stones in Go is kind of complicated and would consume too much computing resources to be 100% correct (and I am not even sure if the 100% is really possible, covering all configurations of stones), BrainKing does not have it. Ergo, if your opponent does not want to cooperate even in a totally lost position, the best solution is to send me (Fencer) a message containing the game ID and a short explanation why the game should be finished manually.

This action can be applied on any game type, of course. But since Go is the most usual source of this kind of problems, the article is mostly focused in it.

The bottom line - if you receive a message of losing a game of Go because an administrator has finished it manually on a request, please don't take it as a biased action against you. The point is to maintain a good level of a fair play.

Autosave is a great feature if you are used to write long posts to discussion boards and don't want to be surprised by a sudden broken connection to BrainKing (and a loss of the unfinished text). However, there are situations when it is still not enough - for example, if you set your autosave interval to 5 minutes, start to write a three pages article and after 3 minutes you would like to save the draft without submitting it.

The solution of the day is the magic combination of Ctrl and Shift keys. If you want to take advantage of this newest improvement of BrainKing, please make sure that:

• You are a paying member and the page Settings / JavaScript is available for you.


• The Autosave interval is set to something else than none and the option Use Ctrl-Enter to submit a text is on (find the mentioned options on the mentioned Settings page).


• You are using Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 or Opera 9 (I have tested it with these browsers).


• You don't use the RTE Editor.

Then, if you start to write a new discussion post or private message or Notepad note etc., try to press Ctrl-Shift, the autosave feature should be instantly invoked and save the text for a later use.

Adding a new feature which is not related to board games at all always brings up both positive and negative reactions. And, of course, YouTube videos support is a good reason to discuss about safety again. Whether such discussion is meaningful or not (I have my opinion ) is not the subject of this entry.

ICRA seal means that public boards are moderated (clicking on the seal on BrainKing.com home page will show a page containing the line "User-generated content such as chat rooms and message boards (moderated)"). According to the recent addition of YouTube video embedding support on Music board, the number of the board moderators has been increased, in order to keep the board under a better control. The question is - should a complaint like "I won't allow my kids to read the Music board because they could see inappropriate videos" be addressed?

The answer is no. More exactly, the answer is "there is no reason to treat the Music board differently" because we could easily say that "bad language can suddenly appear anywhere and until it is moderated, everyone can see it, including children, let's make all public discussion boards unsafe!". It is a nonsense, of course. Bad videos would be removed along with banning the offending user from the board. Furthermore, it is unlikely that bad videos would appear on the Music board at all. An empirical experience.

Now, when I read what I have just written, it seems to be a useless article at all. But even an useless entry can have useful side effects.

And we really don't plan to allow users to embed YouTube (or else) videos to other public discussion boards. The possibility of enabling this feature for private (fellowship) boards can be considered.

This entry is nothing but a short note about "third party scripts". This notion covers all auto-player, Greasemonkey and similar scripts written by BrainKing users which allow players to make the forced moves (auto pass, the only move in the current position, etc.) automatically. Since there are many question regarding this technology, the common answers should be summarized and published:

• It is allowed to use scripts to play forced moves, as long as it does not break the User Agreement.


• BrainKing takes no responsibility for any possible harm which could be caused by using products which are not official BrainKing products (no such official script exists at this moment). If you decide to use the mentioned scripts (and to provide your user name and password in some cases), you do it at your own risk. No complaints like "the script didn't work and I have timeouted in 300 games!" or "someone is accessing my account with my user name and password" will be accepted.


• BrainKing does not guarantee that the third party scripts won't stop working because the structure of BrainKing pages has changed and the scripts fail to read them correctly. Unless an official BrainKing API exists and is published, parsing the HTML code of BrainKing pages is done at your own risk too.

If more questions to this subject appear, I'll be glad to answer them, of course.

The advantage of associating an icon image with a BrainKing account (paying members) is a good and popular feature, especially when I have a look at the gallery pages. It would be great if all users upload their real faces there but I know that it is very unlikely to happen.

However, people tend to change their minds occasionally and there are users who suddenly decide not to show their images anymore (for a reason which is not the subject of this article). They usually solve this problem by uploading a black image (to replace the current one) or sending me a request to deactivate the icon or photo. None of these solutions is ideal.

I have just added the possibility to activate/deactivate the icon by the user himself. If you are a paying member and want to change your icon mode, please go to your Profile page and find the new small form containing four options: Activate icon, Deactivate icon, Activate photo, Deactivate photo. I think it is self-explanatory enough.

I know it would be even better to be allowed to change the icon to one of the previously approved images from the icon history but this feature requires several modifications in the BrainKing code. The time will come.

First of all I must say that, in my own humble opinion, it was not necessary at all because a site's reputation is usually deserved by an overall meaning of the majority of its users, not by labels or seals or marks of any kind. However, I have found the opportunity and decided to put BrainKing through a content rating process. Why not? A label cannot make any harm, as long as it's not misused.

The English home page of BrainKing - http://BrainKing.com now contains a small blue circular clickable image which points to The Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) site where BrainKing has been registered as a site which fulfil all "Family Online Safety" conditions. If you click the label, you should get a page which says that BrainKing is Labelled with ICRA and contains No nudity, No sexual material, No violence, No potentially offensive language, No potentially harmful activities, User-generated content such as chat rooms and message boards (moderated).

Just use this information as you wish.

Which word is correct, gargantuan or gargantuous?

It doesn't matter anyway. The point is that the advantage of the recently added triple gammon tournament type is more significant if a player can play more games with other tournament participants in the same section. Which is the reason why we have enabled a creation of round robin tournaments with sections containing up to 16 players. Such tables could be quite big and occupy more space at the tournament page, but you still have a good chance to win the tournament even if you lose a game or two. Especially when the triple gammon tournament rules are applied.

There is one consequence of this change - since the number of generated games for one player could be up to 15 (or 30 if everyone plays 2 games with every opponent), the current rule of having 5 or 10 empty slots (applies on Brain Pawn, Brain Bishop and Brain Knight level) must be changed as well, most likely in a more flexible way. But it would be addressed later.