BrainKing Knowledge Base

The number of BrainKing discussion boards is not small and it is not easy to keep a good overview of all of them, especially when a user posts something and forgets to check the particular board for responses. There is a "favorite boards" section at the right column of BrainKing game site pages but although it shows the current numbers of new messages (in a red font), important replies can be quickly buried if the board is too frequently used by other contributors.

A new feature, which could solve this problem, has been requested several hours ago and quickly implemented, so everyone can take advantage of it now. There is a new option at the Settings page, called Notify me if someone replies to my discussion board posts. If you set it on and, as it says, someone writes a response to your post, BrainKing will send you a notification to your message box. The notification contains a link to the corresponding discussion board, the name of the reply author and even the reply text itself. Of course, if you want to follow up with the topic, you will not reply to the notification but simply click one of the provided links, locate the post and do the usual.

Of course, this feature works only when a "real" reply is posted - it means that the user who replies to your post must do it using the "Reply" button or the "box" link, otherwise the system cannot recognize the original post. BrainKing is smart but not that smart yet.

"The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world's highest-paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they're doing, day in and day out, twenty-five thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged. We need to take back the airwaves as a sphere of mature conversation and dialogue about our common future."

Duane Elgin, "On Simplicity and Humanity's Future, IONS, Noetic Sciences Review, December 2002

This is neither about a Hong Kong film of the same name, nor a popular internet service, the point of this article results from the recent improvement of BrainKing's bug tracking feature. Since the Report a bug at this page is available at all BrainKing pages now, it obviously helped many people to find out that there is something like a bug tracker (which is good) and when something is working "strange", it must be reported immediately, without thinking about it first or trying to find a solution (which is bad). Ergo, I have decided to publish a list of events/topics/behaviors/issues which should never be posted to the Bug Tracker:

• Pages are loading slowly - it is never a bug to report. Please find the solution here.
• Some images are not displayed - ditto, please refer to this article.
• My opponents are not moving - as long as the defined time control allows it, nobody is obliged to make game moves faster. Who does not like to wait too many days, should accept invitations with a shorter time control.
• The dice are not fair - some clarification of this very popular myth can be found here.
• I have finished a game but my rating chart position has not changed - please read the Position Task paragraph of this entry.
• Advertisements are annoying - it is usually reported by non-paying members who think that advertisements which are included in certain BrainKing pages are too obtrusive. The solution is easy - you can either upgrade to a paid membership level and get a right to disable all advertisements (new options will appear at the Settings page) or stick with a free membership and get used to it.
• My opponent should timeout but 24 hours has been added to his time instead - your opponent is probably using the automatic vacation feature. Please find more information at BrainKing's FAQ page.
• Smiley window does not appear - either this feature is disabled at your Settings / JavaScript page or your browser does not allow to run JavaScripts at BrainKing site. Please check both Settings page and a security panel at your browser's options.

Yes, I know that it might be better to include this list to the Bug Tracker page itself, mostly because the majority of BrainKing users do not speak English, but I want to wait until I am sure it contains all important information before it is passed to the translators. Meanwhile, a link to this article will be added to proper BrainKing pages instead.

One more note - since today, when a new bug is reported, BrainKing stores the reporter's user agent value and the language version of BrainKing he is currently using. The reason is that we can easily retrieve this important information from the bug database instead of asking the user afterwards.

About a year ago I posted a short article about Liquid's FON hotspot and since he has recently persuaded me that it is a good thing, I have connected and published my own FON node as well. Actually, it brings no advantage to foreign people but if you ever decide to visit Prague and go astray to the scope of my signal (and have a WiFi powered smartphone with a Skype client), you can call home for free, using my home internet connection. For those who never heard of FON, please find some information here. It is a very cool project, being supported by Skype, Google and similar big and important companies, and it is supported and promoted by us as well.

I am already tired now, so I have decided to publish the "BrainKing overview" article tomorrow, it would make no sense to do it today at all costs and omit half of important details because of my sleepiness. Meanwhile, who wants to experiment with loading time of BrainKing's Main Page and game pages, can try out a new option Use the "lightweight" version of BrainKing (disables many extra features but could speed up loading of pages) which can be found at the Settings page. Please note that it is mostly in a beta or pre-release status and it has not been officially released yet, so it might do no visible changes for you, but I think it's a good start and there are still many possibilities to make it better and more usable.

I have had an interesting experience with the PayPal site several days ago. I have received a payment to my secondary e-mail address (filip@rachunek.com) and since it is not associated with my PayPal account (by the way, please always use the BrainKing shopping cart system instead of sending money directly), I have had to open my personal PayPal page and add this e-mail address to my account, which is the only way how to be able to get the particular funds.

This story would not be interesting and worth publishing just as it is, of course. The point is that after submitting the e-mail address, I have had to wait 4 minutes for the next page to load. And the operation have not consisted of a sequence of complicated money or data transfers with a set of authenticating and authorizing server-to-server requests, where a certain delay could be expected. Just adding a simple e-mail address.

Creepy, huh? One would say that eBay (which owns PayPal) is a really big company with billions of income every year, so why don't they invest to faster computers, in order to improve the site response? The answer is simple. It is not their fault. Actually, PayPal is a very fast site, from a local user's point of view. Problems of this kind usually occur when a user is located at a different country, because the web page request-response process must be routed through many nodes of the web infrastructure and if only one of them is having performance or throughput problems, there is nothing what the particular site owner can do with that.

And the answer to the next question is - no, it's not just a one time bad luck. In more than 50% of all attempts to use it, PayPal is very slow for me. But this is not a complaint, just an explanation.

I have made a small research to get some examples of the slowness of the web in general. One, two, three, four, five, six. It's just an excerpt, it's not difficult to find hundreds of similar articles or discussions.

A parallel with BrainKing is not a coincidence. There are things we can do and things we cannot do (until we build our own lines around the world). Things we can do can be always explained, discussed and improved, based on user reports. Complaints related to things we cannot do can be easily addressed by linking to this article.

Speaking of that, a new FAQ entry is going to be created soon (because FAQ entries can be translated and this topic might be interesting to everyone) and will contain advices, tips and suggestions what to do if BrainKing is suddenly slower than usual. There are many actions which can be taken by users themselves and the only thing we must do now is to summarize them.

To be continued.

We have been recently archiving game data of the last year and since it has resulted in saving a couple of gigabytes at the main database, I have been wondering how many games could occupy that much disk space. And because some users asked me about this statistics in the past, I am going to reveal the secret.

This is the list of finished games, sorted by years:

• 2002: 9,356 games and 325,000 moves
• 2003: 210,562 games and 8,971,478 moves
• 2004: 323,827 games and 15,099,592 moves
• 2005: 678,600 games and 28,984,678 moves
• 2006: 860,546 games and 36,951,398 moves
• 2007: 792,881 games and 32,130,328 moves

Of course, the extreme increase in the 2003 was caused by the fact that BrainKing had been launched in October 2002, ergo only 3 months could be counted in that year. And a small drop in the last year is a result of removing the Action Points contest - people were motivated to play much more in 2006 where the action had been launched for the first time.

Just keep on playing. The database server disks are huge enough to store much more information and it continuously motivates us to work out new ways of optimization.