BrainKing Knowledge Base

Actually, there are three new features of this day and only one has something to do with some kind of privacy:

• Privacy level of fellowships - since a few fellowship owners have been complaining about a situation when they don't want any more people to join their fellowships but still receive new membership requests which must be manually declined, it is possible to make a fellowship more "private". There is a new option at the fellowship edit page and the option is called privacy level. It can be set to one of the following values:
  • Any paying member can join anytime (no requests or invitations are required) - a fellowship with this option would be "public", which means that any paying member would be able to join it instantly, with no approval process.
  • Members with accepted requests or invitations can join (the default option) - that's how it's been working so far.
  • Only invited members can join (requesting a membership is disabled) - this is the "full privacy" option. When it is set, the Big Boss is no more bothered by unwanted membership requests.


• Show games where it is opponent's turn to move on the main page - it is a new option at the Settings / General page. It can be useful if you want to make the total size of Main Page much shorter because the page would display only games where it is your turn to move. This option can be triggered at the Main Page directly, using the show/hide switch at the opponent's games section.


• Big Jungle has been released, as it's been announced yesterday.

Enough for one day, I guess.

BrainKing is not a typical community (or social networking) site, although it provides many features to allow users to communicate one another, giving a "touch of life" to abstract games. But it is also understandable and perfectly OK that not everyone is eager to chat while concentrating to an interesting game, or because of a risk of being bothered, harassed, etc. After all, BrainKing is a game site, not a chat site (who was the first one to say that?), so it does not ignore the needs of people who incline to the "game only" category.

Actually, there are functions which allow anyone to filter out all messages from an obtrusive opponent - the Blocked users list. However, although it is a powerful feature, it can be mostly used only to solve an effect, not a cause. In other words - a player usually puts another player to his Blocked users list after a communication problem with the respective user, not before.

Furthermore, I have already seen a few user profiles with a note "I want to play only, not to chat". The universal solution is here.

You can see a new line Allow other users to send messages in games: at the Settings page. This switch can be used to define a group of game opponents which are allowed to converse with you while playing games, and nobody else has a possibility to do so. The feature contains three options:

• Nobody - this is a real "Silence of the Universe" because your games will be about a pure playing. Nobody, not even the site owner, can pass a single word to you, when he submits a move in a game with you.
• Friends only - this option enables to use your Friends list as a group of privileged users who can send you in-game messages.
• Everybody - the default option. Any other player can freely have a chat with you, unless you put him to your Blocked users list.

I have also fixed the filter of incoming game invitations - the section Settings / Game Filter / Select games which you allow other players to invite you to. Now it is possible to uncheck all games and not to receive any kind of game invitations anymore. This configuration is indicated by a note The user does not wish to be invited to games at the particular profile page. A typical player who would use this feature is the one who wants to create and accept only public invitations.

So be it. BrainKing's private message system has been improved by a new feature which was requested several times in the past but always postponed because of its low priority. And now, it has been implemented at least, because I have found out that it could be useful for me too, occasionally. Yes, that's a good thing to know - a probability of a feature request implementation drastically grows when the outcome brings advantages for the respective programmer. Cruel, but true.

Never mind. As the title suggests, it is about read receipts. When a private message is sent (using BrainKing's message box) and an outbox copy is created and saved (which is the default option), it is possible to track the message status and find out whether the recipient has already opened and read it. The trick is to open your Message box / Outbox page and check for green dots. If a green dot appears next to the particular message subject (to the left), it means that it's been already read, and moving the mouse cursor over the dot should show a tooltip with exact date and time of reading.

There are a few restrictions:

• It does not work for message which were sent prior to this day because read receipts were not collected before.
• It does not apply to system or group messages. For example, if you sent a group message to all fellowship members, you cannot check which members has read it and when.

However, the main purpose of this feature is to track simple personal messages - and it should work as it is designed.

The web is full of agents, robots, automated scripts and sophisticated analytical tools. It is a good thing because, given the enormous number of web sites and pages, no human-only force could be powerful enough to handle all of them, regarding statistical reports, comparative studies or SEO related information. And I like to keep track on these technologies because 1) many of them can be applied to BrainKing's own artifical intelligence, 2) almost all of them provide funny results, at least occasionally. For instance, one of the most prestigious online marketing companies shows in its automated reports, that rubber soled shoes is #1 of "Top Keywords Driving Traffic" to BrainKing game site. So, if you are interested in a footware, don't forget to play online board games, otherwise you are missing the real value of that.

And since we are obsessed with various searching options, and slowly inclining to a global and ultimate search tool covering all BrainKing pages which contain some meaningful information, another simple search form has been added today. This time it can be found at Game rules page. The usage follows the standard pattern.

The number of board games which can be played at the BrainKing game site has reached 107 and we expect it to grow even more this year, so it is necessary to address this progress and make the New game page better organized.

In order to summarize the evolution of the mentioned page, there are three important stages:

• During the very beginning of the site, there were no more than 10 game types, so all of them could be included in one simple list and nobody had a problem to localize them.
• When the number of games had started to increase, the list had been separated to different categories (chess games, backgammon games etc.) to keep the average length of those sub-pages at a reasonable level.
• The total number of supported board games exceeded 100. A simple search form has been added to the page top.

Shortly, it's possible to search game names and game descriptions (an example). It can be handy, sometimes.

I wonder if I ever make sense of Google page rank system and search results sorting algorithm. For instance, take this blog site. Its page rank is 4/10 which is just an average one, so one would expect that Google lists "higher rated" sites first when certain keywords are being searched. However, when I try to search for more dice poker rolls (the previous article's title, released a few hours ago) or even just dice poker rolls, BrainKing.info is returned as the very first result, leaving sites with 5/10 or 6/10 rank behind. And when the search phrase is reduced to poker rolls only, BrainKing.info blog is still performing very well - 3rd position out of total 531,000.

This interesting outcome has its advantages. For example, a smart choice of one of the next article titles (because page titles are very important for search engines to index and rank them), using some popular and frequently searched keywords, can make BrainKing shown up to people who actually search for something completely different (i.e. real free rolls of online poker sites). And, an increased traffic is always a good thing, especially for current and future partner sites.

Which is, of course, one of the reasons why BrainKing.info site was actually created two years ago.

No more speculations. I have just implemented a solution to something what has been discomforting me for a couple of years. I am sure that many people know the situation very well - you think about the best move to make at a game, finally come to a conclusion, perform the move, submit it and realize that you have forgotten to write an important message to the opponent. The move cannot be reversed, so the only choice is to send a message to the opponent's message box, something like "sorry I forgot to respond in our game".

That's the past. Since today, after a move is submitted, there is still a chance to change the message associated with it, if the following conditions are met:

• The message has not been read by the opponent yet.
• At least one move was performed at the game. Ergo, it is not possible to change the invitation message.
• The game is not finished by this move.

Just visit the particular game page and click the edit link next to your last message, shown at the page top.

And, regarding all other types of messages - the answer is no.