BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

As we have promised, the final bonus code action has been released and it could be a good opportunity for everyone who did not take advantage of the last Christmas action. Let me summarize the rules:

• The action is valid for 24 hours. Please move your mouse cursor to the flashing bulb next to the Paid membership link at the left column to see a tooltip with the exact time period.
• The bonus to the subscribed period is 100-200%, depending on the number of subscribed years. Please click the bulb or visit this page for details.
• After an order is placed, the payment must be received to the end of January 2008.
• As of 1st February 2008, a 19% VAT will be added to all membership prices, which makes them a little more expensive. There is still a chance to get a membership for current rates, to the end of January 2008.

Yes, I know it's just the same what is currently shown as the Server News, but I would like to use this opportunity and add several follow-up information:

• It is not planned to make a similar action in the future, there will be nothing like "since the golden code action has been a great success, we have decided to renew it ...". We want to be consistent about that.
• Since the action has been launched later than on midnight (as announced a week ago), the deadline has been postponed too and is set to 17th January 2008, 7:29:52 a.m. GMT+01:00. The light bulb tooltip at the BrainKing site should show this value recalculated to your time zone.
• It is not possible to use the bonus for other account than the one the membership is ordered for. It means that if you make a 1 year order and get 2 years (100% bonus), you cannot use 1 year for yourself and the bonus year for your friend. An exception can be made if at least 2 years are ordered and paid (60 Euro) but we prefer to keep the rules as they are, without too many modifications.

Actually, this time it is not about experimenting with the BrainKing game site (although we like to do it as well). I have been trying to improve this blog site BrainKing.info, more precisely the blog system it is using. I don't want to criticize the author - it is a very good and versatile platform for everyone who wants to start own blog site without programming it from the scratch - but there is one thing which has been driving me nuts for a long time.

The user registation.

As you probably know, it is possible to leave comments for the blog articles but only if a registered user is logged in, otherwise it would be flooded by spamming robots very quickly. Ironically, that is what discourages the real users because the registration process is not too straightforward, so they rather give it up and don't comment any entries at all (as I have been told many times). So I had a new idea - instead of forcing everyone to create a special account here, let him reuse the existing account from the BrainKing game site. I always liked to build an interoperability between sites, so I have added a new functionality to BrainKing, which mirrors the table of BrainKing users to the corresponding table at the blog system database. It worked perfectly.

The problems have arisen when I have tried to post a new article or use any other administrator function because, as I have realized, the blog adds a combo box containing all registered users to the mentioned pages, most likely to allow the administrator to grant various rights, edit articles of other authors etc. I guess that many people can imagine what happens when a web browser tries to include a widget of this size (containing all 61 thousand BrainKing users) and not just once, some pages can list it up to 20 times - in the better case, the page loading time takes about 20 seconds, in the worse case, it collapses.

The reason to do all of this is that BrainKing.info works more like a standalone site than a part of the BrainKing project and I would like to make it more attractive by integrating several BrainKing functions to the article/comment section and, which is more important, to share the list of BrainKing registered users, in order to bypass the registration problems mentioned above. Fortunately, it is not too difficult to write our own blog system (based on the BrainKing technology), the lack of time is always our worst problem.

Very well, let me change the topic. The recent improvement of the Message box system will probably cause an increase of the total amount of messages and it will be more complicated to locate the selected ones, so I have added a simple search form to the Message box page. It works just like the one at the discussion boards - submitting a keyword will return a list of all messages (of the selected folder) which contain the chosen word(s) at the particular message body.

Although we don't plan to compete with Gmail or similar full-featured web-based e-mail and message systems, it would be nice to support at least the most traditional functions which are expected to be found. The BrainKing Message box has been improved by a "forward" feature - if you open a message in the Inbox or Archive folder, a new button Forward should appear next to the Reply one. The usage is very simple - if you have received an interesting message which you want to share, just click the Forward button, enter the target user's name, write your comment (optional) and click Send. A prefix Fwd: is automatically added to the original message subject, just like e-mail clients do it.

Thanks to the important change which happened last year, the number of team tournaments is increasing and the time has come to organize the results and make interesting statistical information to be found easier. Ergo, the list of team tournament winners is displayed at the Winners / Team tournaments page and the most successful fellowships get another deserved exposure. Furthermore, the fellowship pages contain (just below the fellowship name at the top of the page) the current numbers of team tournaments which were won by the particular fellowship teams, so it is no longer necessary to post links to won tournaments to the fellowship description manually.

The last note - in order to answer any further questions, none of the features which were added this year (and most likely the last year too) have a negative impact on the site performance.

I am sure that it was a good idea to give global moderators the privilege to approve newly created BrainKing account. In addition to saving my time, it greatly improves the first user experience with the site, because he does not have to wait until the next day to have the account activated, but is able to play in minutes after the account registration (and I guess that the majority of new players want to start playing BrainKing games as soon as possible). It reminds me that the current message "your account will be activated in 24 hours" should be changed to a more optimistic estimate (24 minutes?).

If you look at your Message box (after logging in BrainKing game site), you should see a new folder named Trash. And it works just like everyone expects it to work. I dare to say that almost everybody sometimes deletes by accident what should not have been deleted, like an important message or information which should be archived for a later use, it often happens to me too. Since today, if a private message is deleted, it is not really removed from the database but only moved to the Trash folder, where it can be found and even restored back to the original folder. Of course, if a message is deleted from the Trash folder itself, it is permanently destroyed, but there must be an option to wipe out messages if someone wants to do it.

The Trash folder is automatically checked once a day by BrainKing and messages which were "deleted" (moved to trash) more than 30 days ago will be removed by the system.

The reason, why I quote Exodus today, is not anything like a feud or vendetta against another game site. It is just interesting to observe popular web corporations how they add more and more services to their portfolio in order to be able to compete, although some of these services have almost nothing to do with their former specialization.

For instance, have a look at Google and Wikipedia. Wikipedia has released an alpha version of their own search engine called Wikia, which is meant to be controlled by an open community (as an opposite to Google's "black box" - nobody outside the Google company knows how their search engine really works). And Google announced their own encyclopedia project called Knol (yes, I am linking to Wikipedia again, although it promotes a competing site), most likely to increase the income by creating a new advertising space. Maybe it's just a matter of time when Google creates its own game site or MMORPG project because in-game advertising is getting a real boost of popularity, regarding the fact that more and more young people spend much more time playing computer games than watching TV.

Since there were several negative reviews of the Wikia quality of search results, I have wanted to test it and tried to search for "BrainKing". The result is not bad - it is interesting that BrainKing.info blog site is listed at the first position and BrainKing.com game site is the second one. Wikia is obviously not using Google's system of page rank, which is good news - the credibility of the page ranking rules is often very disputable.

By the way, Wikia shows a link to Mini Article at the top of search results page for the give keyword and, just like Wikipedia pages, it can be edited by any registered user. Does someone want to write a mini article about BrainKing?

But it seems that not everyone identify himself with this Goethe's quote, so I have decided to give the gray color a chance and put the former set of Logik pieces to the Settings / Game settings / Logik page. Who feels too confused when the green shows up instead of the gray, can switch it back and be happy.

There is one more improvement of the day and this one is much more important. Some of you might remember my last year article How to fight a spam? where I had described several common ways to filter out fake accounts created by automatic spamming robots. The conclusion was that BrainKing used none of the listed methods because all of them could be cracked (it's just a matter of the particular robot's algorithm), so we apply our own system - all new BrainKing accounts must be manually approved by an administrator before they are active.

The disadvantage of this method is obvious - two administrators who live at the same place (sharing the same time zone) cannot be online 24 hours a day to ensure that new accounts are approved as soon as possible. The ultimate solution has been released an hour ago - all members of the BrainKing team are privileged to do this account approval job too. And since some of them are usually logged in when we sleep, the final time range between an account registration (or profile change) and its approval/denial should be significantly reduced.

And, of course, all of this is related to public information only. All private data are still kept in secret and no unauthorized people can see them, with no exceptions.

Time has come to change the color at last (yes, I like to link to Wikipedia, it's one of my favorite sources of information). I hope that nobody panics if one piece in a game suddenly shows up in a different color than before but it should help to distinguish what is what. It is a small improvement but could delight visually impaired people:

• The gray piece in Logik has been changed to green. No more confusion what is gray and what is white.


• It is possible to turn on numbers 1-8 which would be displayed at the Logik pieces. It can be handy for color blind players.


• There is a new tab at the Settings page (Settings / Game settings / Logik) where the preferred set of pieces can be chosen.

All right, enjoy the Green one.

All right, announced yesterday, finished a while ago. If you are a team captain in some fellowship and your team has at least four members, you should see a new link Create new public team challenge at the fellowship page, right column (containing the team information). This link points to a page where a public team match invitation can be created and posted to the Waiting games page which is now splitted to two parts - players and teams (the latter is the important one, regarding this new feature).

Very well, accepting this kind of challenge is very easy and very similar to accepting a normal game invitation. Simply go to the Waiting games / Teams page and you should see all public team challenges which you are eligible to accept. It means that you must be a captain of the particular game team and your team member count must be equal or greater than the team size, defined for the match.

By the way, the same page also shows a list of game types where you are eligible to start your own public challenge. It is much easier than to go through all fellowships and check all teams one by one.

The time is always against us. I have planned to release a nice improvement to the fellowship system (team matches) today but since the task has turned out to be a little more complicated than I have been thinking, and I am already tired now, it is postponed to tomorrow, because it is always better to stay logged in when something new is launched, in order to observe and quickly fix possible bugs.

Never mind, let me announce something completely different instead. As we was talking about in December, the economical changes of this year give us no other choice than to make a small increase of BrainKing paid membership fees, in order to cover additional expenses, follow the current tax policy etc., details are not interesting. It will not be too much - about 15-20% - but since we don't like to do things like that without a well timed warning, we had created the December Bonus Code action and if someone was not able to use the December bonuses, today's article announce the final opportunity of this kind.

There is going to be the ultimate day of bonuses and it is scheduled to Wednesday 16th January 2008, 00:00:01 - 23:59:59 GMT+01:00. I will not copy the Christmas action in all details - we like to make changes, something like a golden or silver code - but the elemental principle remains the same. All rules will be posted on time.

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.

If you have your own web pages which contain a content you would not like to see copied elsewhere or stolen, don't forget to update the current year to 2008 - it's interesting how many commercial sites didn't do it yet, including Blizzard's World of Warcraft client application, it still shows "Copyright 2004 - 2007 Blizzard Entertainment, all right reserved". I was never good at updating this information on time at BrainKing, so I have made this information more dynamic at last - since yesterday, it will always show 2002 - x range where x is the current year, equal to 2008 at this moment. It's not too important feature but it's also another thing I can stop thinking about every year again.

Yesterday I have posted a short note about changes to the list of BrainKing global moderators and I would like to make it described closely today. So, we would like to thank Rose and NOT a floosie (who decided to leave the team) for a great and devoted work because being a global moderator requires very good nerves and communication skills which is almost equivalent to a full time job. And I would like to welcome RedFrog and Vikings who have joined the team yesterday and today. Keeping a good staff is always an important aspect of every company and BrainKing is not an exception. And although it is a game site, not a chat site, discussion boards make a non-trivial part of it and we take it seriously, just like the rest of BrainKing.

I have decided to pay a tribute to the very first non-English-non-Czech localization of BrainKing game site and registered a Portuguese national domain for us at last. It works exactly like the other ones - opening the http://BrainKing.com.pt URL will show BrainKing home page in Portuguese and should work as an entry point for our Portuguese speaking users.

One might wonder why it is http://BrainKing.com.pt instead of http://BrainKing.pt. Well, the reason is that every country has its own domain registration rules and some of them don't allow to register a second level domain (i.e. BrainKing.pt) unless a local branch of a company of the same name exists at the particular country. And since nothing like BrainKing company exists anywhere, we are happy with the .com.pt substitution too.

By the way, there have been small changes to the list of global moderators (regarding BrainKing's discussion board system). If you want to be aware of the current status, please visit the BrainKing Staff page.

There are always unrevealed things to learn, even if you think that you perfectly know a product you work with almost daily. For example, a database system. Yesterday I have announced a 2 hours downtime in order to make a database archiving tonight because it used to be a good estimation of the overall duration. The I have tried to simulate this process on my computer and after 2 and half hours of hard disk crunching I have think of "hell, it's taking a little longer than usual, let's reserve 3 hours instead" and changed the time range to 21:00 - 24:00. Not a good feeling, though.

Fortunately, the web is full of smart and experienced people who share their knowledge with others and I still have felt a vague thought in my mind that I have been reading about a better way how to do certain database processes. Good news - I have recalled them. The time of the archiving action has been reduced to 11 minutes only. What a relief.

The conclusion: BrainKing will be turned off at 21:00 GMT+01:00 and if nothing goes wrong, it should come back to life after 30-60 minutes (there are some preamble and closing processes which take time too). If not, there is no reason to panic, we would be probably making additional checks that everything is all right.

For a few hours only.

As I have mentioned yesterday, we need to turn off the database server for a while, in order to move game data of the last year to the archive database and perform a defragmentation of the rest of the main database, which should result in a better overall performance (because although the database server is a very fast machine, the number of simultaneously connected users is growing as well).

And since some preparations must be done first and we prefer to announce such events at least 24 hours in advance, this downtime is scheduled on 3rd January 2008, 21:00 - 24:00 GMT+01:00. We have reserved 3 hours for that, because the BrainKing database is really huge and it's better to check twice that everything is transferred and converted correctly than fix serious problems on the fly afterwards.

The usual aftermaths (disabled timeouts, more time to Fischer's clock games etc.) will be applied automatically.