BrainKing Knowledge Base

Firefox is a powerful and robust web browser, but sometimes it can cause problems to less experiences users who accidentally turn on certain security blocks and don't know how to unblock them. It is not a rare situation in these times when annoying popups and different kinds of attacks threaten people on a daily basis, and since I was solving a real "my BrainKing images have suddenly disappeared" issue of one BrainKing user, I have decided to write this short article because it could happen to more people.

All right, what to do if you are using Firefox, an "ignore images from this domain" appears, you click on it and then want to make the particular images visible again?

• Go to Tools / Options menu of your Firefox window.
• Activate Content tab of the Options window and click Exceptions ... button next to Load images automatically option.
• Wait until a list of blocked sites appear. Warning! If you are using Spybot - Search & Destroy or similar anti-spyware program which automatically blocks blacklisted sites, it can take 10-20 seconds to activate the blocked list box, so don't panic and be patient.
• Find the i.brainking.com line and remove it.

That's it, you should observe no further problems with BrainKing images.

I would like to drop a line about user icons and profile photos (not to be mistaken with photo albums). I am sure that many people observed that a non-existent image is shown where an icon should be, for some BrainKing users, and the reason of this small issue is that it is always a little risky to release a formerly admin-only feature to public.

All right, what is it about?

• There are Activate/deactivate icon/photo options at profile pages of paying members. These small forms used to be available only to BrainKing administrators in the past, but due to enormous amount of request from some people to disable their icons for any reason (don't ask me why), I decided to enable this process to everyone, which means that any paying member of BrainKing can simply deactivate his profile icon/photo if he feels like that.
• However, this function is probably a little misleading because other people have been trying to "activate" their icons without uploading them first. That's not the right approach. And it would not be too meaningful to write a FAQ entry about it because not everyone reads how-to descriptions.

Very well, it has been fixed at last. The mentioned activate/deactivate icon/photo forms are available only if the proper images actually exist for the user, so if you don't see these options at your profile page anymore, please try to use the Profile / Upload icon link to provide some image first.

Actually, it was released five days ago but since I prefer to post no more than one article a day, I have decided to write a few words about it today.

Google made an important upgrade of their language tools and added new languages to translate from and to. And since Czech in included there too (at last), it should be good news for everyone who has been asking me for a good English-Czech translator, most likely because Czech players form the third biggest group on BrainKing, so many people play games with them and a good translating service can significantly improve an in-game conversation.

Besides, the mentioned upgrade of Google language tools now supports 16 languages out of 20 BrainKing localizations. That's a nice step forward to break language barriers.

http://www.google.com/language_tools

First of all - since I have been told that white player starts a game of Italian Checkers, not black, I've made this change to the game model and it also affects all started and already finished games of Italian Checkers. So, if your pieces have suddenly changed the color, it is not a bug. I hope nobody gets too confused.

And now, what is more important - BrainKing starts a cooperation with Frank Berger, the author of professional backgammon software for Windows, Mac and Linux, called BGBlitz. Since today, every BrainKing user, who purchases or renews at least 1 year membership of any level, will get a 20% discount of a Player or Professional version of BGBlitz. The bonus would be displayed at the particular order page as a short description with customized PayPal buttons, so the only think you have to do is to choose the BGBlitz version and click the proper button.

It also means that BrainKing currently offers two bonuses to every 1 year membership purchase - 50% discount of a 300AD.com game and 20% discount of BGBlitz. Take them while they are hot.

A short comparing of different BGBlitz versions.

Let me summarize some BGBlitz features (copied from BGBlitz home page with a permission of Frank Berger):

• Play Backgammon against a world class opponent or play over the network.
• A tutor helps to improve your game.
• Rollout position with optional variance reduction.
• Choose between several themes. See the themes page.
• Train your skill with quiz databases.
• Train your cube handling in match play.
• Replay your games.
• Collect matches in databases.
• Convert from/to different match-formats and to HTML.
• Use the precise endgame database.
• Completely internationalised. Current languages are English, German, Dutch (Roger Troost), Italian and French (Radu-Dan Sabau), Spanish (José Manuel Solis Preisser), Danish (Søren Pingel Daalsgard), Hebrew (Shahar Tal), Swedish (Peter Nevalainen), Turkish (Özgür Albayrak), Catalan (Xavier Blanquer), Chinese (Angelita Li), Polish (Miroslaw Golda), Japanese (Katsutoshi Seki) and Russian (Oleg Timshin). Thanks to all of them.
• And more ...

Well, what should I add? I like to support all interesting projects which have something to do with board games and since backgammon is still the most played game on BrainKing game site, I am sure that BGBlitz would be worth trying for the majority of BrainKing community.

Although BrainKing's chat box is not filled with hundreds of messages every day (actually, at least the Czech room is kind of active), I like this opportunity to have a chat with currently connected people and since the static version of this feature (Chat room page) was created mostly for people with JavaScript-disabled browsers and provided no extra functionality, I have decided to change this status a little.

Starting today, the Chat Room page contains the following improvements:

• Older messages are displayed with date and time. It is useful in less frequent rooms where it is not clear whether the time values refer to the current day or some other day in the past.
• History can be browsed (pagination). If you missed a conversation because it is already pulled down by newest messages, it can be easily found by page links above and below the message list.
• Messages can be searched using a simple search form at the top of the page, and results are returned with the particular context links. It means that if the context link is clicked, the page containing the particular message is displayed and the corresponding conversation can be accessed as well.

But I still like the interactive JavaScript version more. However, I use the static one as a resource of historical data.