BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

We have been experiencing an interesting situation during the last night (or, more precisely, everyone except us who were sleeping). For a strange reason, BrainKing has been accessible but no usable, showing only small parts of pages, making all its features unavailable. The parallel to a clinical death is kind of descriptive - the brain is not dead but the rest of the life functions seem to be inactive. A terrifying chimera when it happens to a computer.

All right, everything is up and running now, so one could ask why the automatic system that monitors BrainKing functions did not make a red alert which would perform the site restart itself? The reason is simple - from a machine's point of view, everything was working correctly. The BrainKing process was alive, the web pages were sent to the clients (well, only a few bytes were actually delivered but that's what the server is not and cannot be aware of) and about 40 users were logged on (although they could not do anything). Nobody says that BrainKing's artificial intelligence is unmistakable but, since this morning, it has been improved by one more continuous test to handle this kind of situation.

The principle is easy - it's not possible to detect if a web page (sent from the server) reaches the client undamaged, but it's possible to find out that nobody can play games, because if a game page is not displayed, it's not possible to make a game move and submit it. In other words, BrainKing verifies on a regular basis (once a minute) if some moves have been submitted in the last 30 minutes and if not, it automatically invokes a set of recovering processes which fix the site status and make it available for everyone again.

By the way, be warned if you use the Microsoft Home Server at your computer, you can easily lose your data. And, at the time of writing this entry, no patch to fix this serious bug is available.

As a big fan of an artificial intelligence and automatic systems (my dream is to live in a luxury house with its own brain), I like to add features which make BrainKing less dependent on my input and more self-sustaining entity. One of the last parts of the site, which had to be completely processed manually, was the system of interviews. And, in order to make our life easier, the improvement of the day solves this problem once and forever:

• A new link Interviews has been added to the Information section of the left menu column, so the Interviews page is no longer buried under the discussion boards and can be easily accessed from any page.


• The interview moderator (which is currently pauloaguia) can select a new user to be interviewed and add his/her to the list displayed at the Interviews page. When it is done, the interview entry is marked open and every registered user can submit his own questions for the interviewee (using a simple form).


• Each open interview has a deadline - after that, BrainKing automatically switches the interview to the answer mode, which means that no more questions can be added/modified and the interviewed person starts to submit the answers.


• The answers are not visible to public until all questions are addressed. When it is done, the interview moderator makes the final check and if everything is all right, he releases the completed interview.

I hope this change will make the interview process smoother and without any more terrible delays (caused by me, of course ). And it is allowed to use BrainKing smileys at the questions or answers.

This is a PR article, published by a BrainKing partner site. It is not related to BrainKing December (Christmas) Action.

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Date / Time: 20.12.2007 / 7:00 pm (SERVER TIME)



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In order to make BrainKing fellowships more flexible, a new rank called Little Boss has been recently added. As the name suggests, it should work as an assistant to the Big Boss who still remains as the fellowship owner. The purpose of a Little Boss is to give other members all necessary permissions to keep the fellowship alive, even in case of the Big Boss inactivity, because fellowships which are not maintained, are good candidates for a deletion. The following list summarizes the functionality:

What a Little Boss can do:

• Invite new members to the fellowship.
• Accept or reject membership requests.
• Change a rank of every member except the Big Boss.
• Create game teams and change team ranks of all members.
• Create fellowship tournaments, ponds and stairs.
• Send team match invitations to other fellowships and accept/reject them.
• Send group messages to all fellowship or team members.

And what a Little Boss cannot do:

• Change the fellowship name, description or flag.
• Change the Big Boss.
• Delete the fellowship.

I hope that I haven't forgotten to mention some features. Furthermore, the Little Boss rank is the first candidate for a Big Boss replacement if BrainKing decides that it should be done. Practically it means that if a Big Boss is not active for more than 60 days, BrainKing automatically promotes the Little Boss to the Big one and the former Big Boss would be degraded to a manager.

And yes, only one Little Boss can be defined for a fellowship.

I have been collecting the most common questions to the current action of membership bonuses and decided to make a more detailed blog entry when all additional features are implemented and tested. Which is now. First of all, I would like to post the rules again:

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Christmas Special! It is almost December and, like every year, we are launching our Christmas action. This time it is not just about an extra month to the subscribed membership, everybody has a chance to get up to 100% bonus, based on the popular system of color codes. Let me remind the rules of this action:

When you see a small flashing light bulb on the Main Page, you know a bonus is active and can be used. But don't hesitate for a long time - some bonuses (especially the one which adds 100% to the subscribed period) can be active only for several minutes. The bonuses can be used only if a purchased membership is for 1 year or longer period and it is not a Brains payment.

This action will be active to the end of this year. Furthermore, we have added a nice improvement - you don't have to send a payment in 72 hours to validate the bonus (like before), it must be received to the end of this year - 31st December 2007, 23:59:59 GMT+01:00. The reason is that we would like to make this opportunity available to all users, including those who use a wire transfer or other slower methods to pay.
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All right, the answer follow:

• Can I use the bonus if I want to buy a membership for a friend as a Christmas present and make it activated on 24th December? Yes! It's not a problem at all and this option exists since last December. Please read the related blog entry for instructions.


• Who decides which bonus code is activated and for what time period? Unlike last year when all bonus codes and their durations were defined by myself and manually, BrainKing is fully in charge of this process and randomly selects these parameters on a regular basis. Of course, there are some restrictions and, for instance, 100% bonus code has a much lower probability to appear than 1 month one. The important thing is that no human factor can affect the choice, so the rules are fair and equal to everyone.


• How can I recognize whether a bonus code will be used for my order or not? Just make sure that the light bulb at the left column is on when you click the Place the order button. Adding a membership subscription to the shopping cart is not enough - the order must be really placed and then the bonus code is associated with it. You can always check it at your Profile / Order list page - when you open the particular order, the bonus code should appear at the top right corner.

I would like to add that we will probably change our pricing policy next year, due to European Union rules and regulations. It means that everyone has a good chance to subscribe or renew now, when the conditions are very convenient and profitable.