BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

The game proposal of the day has been created by ColonelCrockett and Retep, and the intention of this variant is to bring new ideas and possibilities to the classic Jungle game and make it less "drawish".

The idea for a jungle variant is pretty simple. The "hierarchy" of jungle pieces is the same as in regular jungle except that the board will be bigger and more pieces added (see the screenshot). The new board is 9x9 (adding a file on either side of the existing board). The extra pieces follow the "zigzag" placement pattern to be at either end of the second and eighth rank.

The two new pieces are the monkey and the snake. The monkey is just above the cat in the hierarchy of animals but moves like a chess king. The monkey is on a player’s left (elephant side for either player). Once the new ranks are added to either side of the jungle board that would put a white monkey on a2 and a black one on i8. The Snake is at the opposite end of the 8 and 2 rank from the monkey. (a8 and i2 on the new board). It moves like a Silver General in Shogi (i.e. diagonally a singly square and forward a single square). His place in the hierarchy of animals is between the dog and leopard.

To compensate for the larger board two water squares are added … one at each end of the 5th rank (a5 and i5 on the 9x9 board).

And, as usual, comments are welcome.

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.

I have been thinking about an importance of search engine results today. It is a plain and simple truth that being well indexed by Google is a good thing, especially when a new site is launched and the targeted community should be addressed without investing an awful amount of money to classic advertising methods. Anyway, it is not a matter of life and death for BrainKing which, unlike other types of web based companies, does not live only on a regular growth of paying customers. There is always a Plan B. But it is not the subject of this article. Since I like to collect and analyze statistical data, I occasionally have a look at the Web Statistics pages of BrainKing sites and find interesting results.

For example, the page shows a list of most frequent key phrases which were used by visitors in search engines to find BrainKing.info (this site). This is a Top Six excerpt:

• games site advertising - This is an interesting one. Since there are several text advertisements at this page and BrainKing.info is a product of a game site, it is not a big surprise, anyway. I have a friend who wants to write a diploma thesis about the current status of different kinds of web advertising, so I am glad that I can give him many useful information, based on my own experience. Furthermore, I plan to release a new product soon, as an experiment.


• board game ideas - Yes! The new article category. There are many smart game enthusiasts who like to present new game ideas, and BrainKing.info site is the best place to discuss about them. At this time, I already have 2 or 3 game proposals, waiting in a queue. They will be posted soon.


• make your own gamesite - Hmmmm. Anybody wants to make own game site? Don't do it unless you are prepared to devote yourself to this idea, in a long time perspective. I know what it is about. But if you are lucky, the result is worth the effort.


• picture popup gamesite - Actually, we have some "picture popups" at user profile pages and there is also the smiley popup window. Not much to say about it.


• how to create a bad reputation blog - Yay! Is BrainKing.info a good example of a bad reputation blog? Well, I think the real source of this search result is the article about "bad reputation partners" I wrote a year ago. There is one positive implication of this fact - even a year old articles are still being found by Google and other search engines, so it was definitely not a waste of time.


• not blocked game sites This phrase has been found even in 4 different variants, so I guess that something like a "blocked game site" is a common problem. It is well known that many companies don't like when their employees play board games during working hours, so they try to block selected domains and make them inaccessible within the company network. Well, if someone has this problem with brainking.com domain, there is still a chance to try other domains - brainking.cz, brainking.es, brainking.de etc. It is not guaranteed to work (because all of them are mapped to the same IP address) but it is always worth checking.

There are many other phrases, more or less interesting - for instance "nice tooltips", "advantages of auction system", "publicity euros pixel", "what is funweb", "online game of the year", "how to hack brainking" (who dares!? ), "people giving away pawn accounts" (a multi account promotion?), "madmonkey team" (go monkeys!) etc. - but it's not necessary to analyze all of them. Definitely not the funny ones.

I have intentionally made a little longer delay after posting yesterday's article, just to keep it at the page top for a longer time, according to important information it contains. It also gives me several ideas for my own blog system, which is currently under a development.

"Yahoo Inc rejected Microsoft Corp's unsolicited $44.6 billion takeover offer as too low on Monday, forcing the software maker either to sweeten the bid or adopt a hostile approach to clinch a deal." - I cannot resist to post it as well. Well done, Yahoo! Although 44.6 billion USD is a nice amount and Microsoft calls its offer "full and fair", it is really not enough to swallow a company of Yahoo size and reputation. However, Microsoft does not give up and it is likely that its next step will be to make a little push to Yahoo shareholders instead. And since any outcome of this event would be very important to all web based sites and companies (including BrainKing), I am going to watch the progress very carefully.

Speaking of Yahoo, BrainKing uses its web services for our Press Monitoring page and, as I have just found out, it suddenly stopped working for some reason. It is not a vitally important feature but I am going to investigate it anyway. Maybe it is just being used too often and BrainKing exceeded some kind of limit. Strange things happen these days.

I have created a new article category, called "BrainKing Performance Tuning". Actually, it is not about the site performance, which is very good, as the tests prove many times. More precisely, it is about BrainKing connectivity tuning.

I have made another experiment today. Using the functionality of public proxy servers, I have routed my Firefox connection through 5 different proxy servers (located in Germany, France, United Kingdom, USA and Canada), one by one, and tested the average loading time of selected BrainKing pages. In order to compare results with my local access, I have opened the same BrainKing at the next Firefox tab and performed the same clicks.

The results are interesting, more or less. The average page loading time is:

• The same as the local one - 1-2 seconds (Germany and France)
• 3-4 seconds (United Kingdom)
• 5-6 seconds (USA and Canada)

One could say that the more remote the proxy server is, the longer delay has been detected. It is logical - the data must pass through more network nodes and routers, and every single one can cause a short delay. That's how the internet works and due to the same reason, PayPal (an example) is much slower for me than local sites.

I would like to make one thing fully clear - this is not a definitive conclusion of any kind, I have just made some tests to confirm my theories. However, if I take the measured times as some kind of reference, it is not a bad result at all, considering the fact that BrainKing pages had to be sent there and back (e.g. from BrainKing server to the American proxy and then back to my computer), so if we divide the time by two, we get an average loading time of 4 seconds. Furthermore, proxy servers can be used by hundreds or thousands of other people simultaneously, so some kind of overload (ergo, more delay) has been expected as well. Videlicet: It is slower than my local NIX connection but still far from being called "dead slow".

Important: It is not recommended to use any public proxy servers to access sites where any kind of personal information must be submitted (including user names and passwords) - thus it is not recommended to use them to access BrainKing. And, of course, I didn't make these checks with Fencer account. For security reasons, a normal test account has been used instead.

However, there is something ... (to be continued)

Yes, it is here again, I am posting again what was already posted many times. It seems that this topic is a "fixed star" and never goes off. But I hate to copy and paste only, so there is some more information - whether it is popular or not is up to everyone to decide.

Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer's movement in time, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, so it is realized that BrainKing's speed is not an absolute but depended on the observer's location in the web.

I have made an experiment and check BrainKing accounts of all users who have been complaining about BrainKing being too slow for them during the recent month, one by one. The checking procedure has consisted of the following steps:

• Logging in and displaying the most important BrainKing pages - Main Page (game list), a discussion board page, a game page, a tournament page (with section tables), a fellowship page, a profile page, etc.
• Doing it again with all three styles (castle, simple and no fonts), all major web browsers (the latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera), and three different internet connections (cable, ADSL and mobile GPRS).

Outcome:

• Average page generation time is 0.3 seconds.
• Average page loading time is 1-2 seconds (except GPRS, where the loading time increases to 5-10 seconds, but GPRS is a very slow connection type anyway).
• No performance issues have been observed during a 30 minutes long continuous test.

I have also checked accounts of a few users who have more than 2000 started games at this moment, just to make sure that this number has no negative impact on the performance. The results have been almost the same, except the page generation time which have increased to 1.5 seconds (logically, it takes a little more time to create a page with a table containing 2000 rows).

These tests were performed several times in different hours to check the site behavior in different time zones.

Conclusion: Based on all possible tests we are capable of to do, BrainKing has no known performance issues, regarding the server side. The total duration of all tests also forecloses the local network line bottleneck as a possible cause of slow page loading.

Got it? I hope it is clear enough even for rattlebrains and blog trolls.

Further explanation of possible causes of a slowness:

• BrainKing generates pages too slowly - negative. This is a server-side only feature and is not affected by the target user location. The mentioned tests have proved that the average page generation time is very fast.
• BrainKing works slowly only for certain users - negative. The tests have been done for more than 15 different accounts of different levels, different number of started games and different amount of total displayed information. No anomalies have been detected.
• BrainKing transfers generated pages too slowly - negative. Since the tests have been done using 3 different connections and one of them works through a foreign proxy server (located in Europe but not in our country), it is proved that at least the speed of local lines is sufficient. And it is logical that we cannot affect the performance of other lines which are not controlled by us. That's the nature of the web.
• BrainKing is slow and all other sites are fast - negative. Yes, that's one of the most popular complaints. And one of the most annoying myths too. A term "brainwashed" suggests itself first of all, but I think it's better to say that people are not used to think globally. I could say with the same "success" that PayPal is the slowest money processing site in the world and all other sites of this kind are operating at a light speed, and it would be just the same nonsense.

For any further information, please read About the complexity (part 1) (and I recommend to read the section containing Important! Do not use BrainKing public discussion boards for this purpose. in particular - meaningful comments can be posted here instead), Bug me not! or BrainKing site performance again.

And yes, this article is meant to be provoking. (to be continued - most likely)

According to our experience from the past, it seems that introducing new games invented by BrainKing users is not a good idea if those games were not thoroughly tested and discussed first. It is always a difficult job to change rules of already released games, not to mention the necessity to modify all 20 translations of the former rules description.

And it is the reason why I have just created a new article category, called Board Game Ideas. It should be a good opportunity for everyone to post comments or suggestions to all new game proposals which we want to publish here, in order to pinpoint possible unbalances and similar problems, before the game implementation work is actually started.

The first entry to this category introduces a proposal of three Ludo variants, suggested by Michael Coan:

• Ludo Variant #1: (since "faster" games seem to be very popular)
  
  Name Idea: Ludo Express
  
  Same board and pieces as regular Ludo.
  
  Get out of start with either a 1 or a 6.
  
  Roll 2 dice each turn. Each turn, 2 dice rolled. (doubles are nothing special)
  
  Each dice is separate. Like Backgammon, you first make a move with Dice #1 – then make a move with Dice #2 (or swap and move first with Dice #2, then Dice #1 – order is up to player) You can move the same piece twice, OR move 2 different pieces – 1 with each die
  
  So for example, first turn of the game, you roll a 1 & 6 – you have 2 options. Use the "1" to get out of start, and then use the "6" to move 6 spaces – or use the "6" to get our of start, and then use the "1" to move 1 space.
  
  You can split the dice up between different men. You can use the "1" to get a piece out, and use "6" on a different piece on the board.
  
  NOTE: If you own man is sitting on your "start space", you have to move it BEFORE you can get another piece out of the board.
  
  If you can move – you have to move. (only pass if you have no move) Plus it is possible to move with 1 die, and then pass the other if there is no move with that one.
  
  The rest are the same rules as regular Ludo.


• Ludo Variant #2:
  
  Name Idea: Ludo Strategy
  
  Same board and pieces as regular ludo. 2 main differences:
  
  1. You can place your piece on top of another one of your own pieces to form a "block". This "block" will block the board an NO pieces (yours or opponents) can move past the block. To get rid of the block, you simple move the "top" piece from the block just as a regular turn (leaving your bottom piece still sitting there in danger of a capture)
  
  2. You can move forward like normal, or backwards. If you roll something like a 6, then bonus 3 – you must either move a piece forward a total of 9 spaces, or backwards a total of 9 spaces. There is no "splitting" the dice up and going forward 6, then back 3.
  
  NOTE #1: You can NOT move backwards past your starting point. You can move backwards all the way to and on top of the starting spot, but not any further
  
  NOTE #2: You can NOT move backwards out of your own "home" area. Once you enter your home (last 4 ending spots), you can no longer move those pieces backwards.


• Ludo Variant #3:
  
  Name Idea: Ludo Strategy Express
  
  As you can guess, it would be a combination of the 2 variant ideas above. Have the "fast" with the ability to block & move backwards.
  
  The only difference would be because you roll 2 dice each time, you CAN split the forward/backwards decision up. Move with 1 die forward, and then move with another die backwards. (same or different pieces)

Comments are welcome.

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.

I have been wondering whether I should write about "email" or "e-mail" when I want to refer to, er, e-mail. It seems that Wikipedia (again) can give some kind of an answer:

"Spelling of this term is disputed. Many now regard the word "email" as a perfectly valid and formal word in its own right, and regard the abbreviation "e-mail" as anachronistic. The word "email" is recognized as a valid English word in all major dictionaries however the e-mail abbreviation is often still used. Despite the word "email" being used in common English the computer industry and web sites still use multiple variants of the term." (read more)

Well, for some reason, I am used to "e-mail" although it might really look a little bit anachronistic, but when I see "email", I think of a vitreous enamel instead. It's a matter of taste. The point is that e-mails are not too reliable because this system provides no mechanism for good tracking a sent message, so we are trying not to use them, regarding BrainKing functions. The change of the day is closely related to this issue.

Many people have been complaining that after they post a new bug report to BrainKing's bug tracker system, they are not informed about the bug status and progress because BrainKing sometimes fails to send them an e-mail notification. Fortunately, it is a history. When a particular bug is updated by a new comment, all participants (the initial reporter and all comment authors) are immediately notified about this event to their message boxes. This solution also provides a better mechanism of linking to the corresponding bug report because everything is happening within BrainKing pages.

Right now, it is not possible to customize this feature, e.g. set an option not to be notified about selected reports changes or add interesting reports to a watch list etc. It can be done later.

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.

Ha! As expected, Google does not stand aside, regarding the recent announcement of possible Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft, and fires back with a statement that Microsoft-Yahoo deal poses antitrust issues. It may be true, if we take into account the number of Yahoo web based e-mail addresses, Instant Messaging users and other popular services which are widely used by millions of people and they would instantly become Microsoft customers. On the other hand, there is a rumour that Yahoo is not satisfied with current Microsoft offer of 44.6 billion USD and wants to negotiate with Google as well. However, it is not likely that a Google-Yahoo merge would ever happen, given a simple fact that Google's share of Top 10 Search Providers for December 2007 table is 56.3%, so adding the Yahoo's 17.7% share would definitely make an antitrust issue too.

By the way, BrainKing can be used to monitor this kind of news too: Press Monitoring page. And the fact that the news are provided by Yahoo Web Services is nothing but a coincidence.

Regarding BrainKing news and events, the fresh option to edit the last game message before it is spotted by the opponent has revived an old request to make this feature possible for private news as well. And it is done. If you add a note to your game, you should see a new link edit next to the delete one. The usage is apparent.

Microsoft wants to buy one of its important competitors (regarding the market of search engines) Yahoo and the current bid is 44.6 billion USD. Whether this merge of titans would really happen and cause a serious threat to Google or not, is not clear at this moment and Yahoo officially calls this bid "unsolicited". Anyway, it is a good example of a Story of the Day because such offers do not happen too often. And since many web based companies, including BrainKing, are kind of affected by results provided by major search engines, I am definitely going to keep an eye on this potential significant change at the field of web marketing.

If you are interested in more details, read the full story here.

The BrainKing change of the day is far less breathtaking than the Microsoft one but still can be interesting to players who like to spend their Brains for tournament entry fees with a chance to win a severalfold amount back. In order to make this opportunity affordable to everyone (especially those who do not like to risk too much), the minimal amount of Brains for an entry fee has been reduced to 5, instead of former 50. This value can be defined while the particular tournament is being created and, as I can see, some tournament creators have already noticed that. Very well.

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.

Although Encyclopaedia Britannica or About.com says something a little different about a dice poker (or poker dice), BrainKing follows the original Yahtzee rules (who the hell invented this word which is kind of hard to pronounce in some languages?) and since dice games seems to be very popular (because of the luck factor or short and fixed number of moves?), we have recently added two more variants to the BrainKing game site - Dice Poker 6D and Triple Dice Poker 6D.

At the moment of writing this article, BrainKing's section of game rules does not contain detailed rules for those new additions, so let me summarize it here before it is posted and translated at the BrainKing game site as well:

1. Ones - a sum of all 1's
2. Twos - a sum of all 2's
3. Threes - a sum of all 3's
4. Fours - a sum of all 4's
5. Fives - a sum of all 5's
6. Sixes - a sum of all 6's
7. 4 of a kind (4 or more dice with the same number) - a sum of all dice
8. 5 of a kind (5 or more dice with the same number) - a sum of all dice
9. Full House (3 dice with the same number + 2 dice with the same number, and those two numbers must be different) - 25
10. Full Car (2 dice with the same number + 2 dice with the same number + 2 dice with the same number, and those three numbers must be different) - 40
11. Full Hotel (3 dice with the same number + 3 dice with the same number, and those two numbers must be different) - 50
12. Large Straight (a straight of 5 or more dice) - 45
13. Full Straight (a straight of all dice) - 60
14. 6 of a kind (all dice with the same number) - 75
15. Chance (any dice combination) - a sum of all dice

The triple version contains a bonus row which makes 50 points (instead of 35 at the normal triple dice poker) and minimal sum of points of the first six rows to get the bonus is 84 (and its multiplies at the second and third columns).