BrainKing 3.0 preview - list of changes and improvements

I think that I had mentioned a development of the upcoming version of BrainKing at some time in Summer and since former plans and vision was changed at least 10 times, I guess it is a good idea to present the current status, in order to make people prepared for it. There are many things that will look a little (or completely) different and so will be the very core of the system and site.

First of all, I would like to say something about the time schedule. The estimated time to rewrite the whole site and add all planned features (or at least the most important ones) is about 2 months. Of course, it means 2 months of 24 hours work every single day, which is far from reality. Furthermore, when unexpected events occur, and usually more than one at the same time, the release date is always postponed.

In other words, nobody can say when exactly BrainKing 3.0 could be finished and completely tested. Anyway, more than 60% of work is already done and I am more than happy with the outcome.

All right, the changes and improvements follow:

• Visual change
  After a long consideration we had decided to turn back to a simple style of pages with a minimum of distracting graphics. There are several reasons for that:
  • Our statistics says that more than 70% of active users already switched to Simple style, so the Castle style community actually is a minor one.
  • The upcoming version of BrainKing will support customizable boxes with various content and our tests show that it is very inconvenient to squash them to "castle towers" with a fixed width.
  • It is too time consuming to keep three official styles of BrainKing pages and test every new feature with them. It would be almost impossible to maintain the flexibility of new pages under current conditions.
  • The Castle style contains a nasty blank space at the page top (between side tower roofs) and it would not be used at all because the chat box is to be changed as well.
  As a good compromise, BrainKing's home page will keep the Castle style, just like it is now. It is a different situation because the home page mostly contains general information about the site and user specific data should not appear there at all.


• New system of game models
  As some users probably remember, BrainKing was formerly created with Chess (and some variants) only and all other games were subsequently added, usually as extensions of the basic Chess model with more or less modifications (as you can imagine, in case of e.g. Backgammon there were really many modifications). It is clear that Chess model does not correspond with many other game types and it is the main reason why all games need to be completely rewritten, especially now, when we support 128 of them. It should result in a better stability and no more illegal moves, not even if someone tries to hack the system.


• More privacy, less public content
  Public content is always a potential source of problems because it usually becomes a target of spammers or notorious complainers which does not add too good publicity to the site, not to mention the time moderators must spend to fight bad content. Ergo, public discussion boards will be replaced by a new system that would be focused on groups of friends, event comment threads and a rewritten module of problem reports or "I am lost, please help me" inquiries.


• More automatic processes
  Thanks to the previous point, it will be possible to change many functions and processes (which are currently operated manually by administrators) to automatic server-driven ones. For example:
  • New account registration: Since there will be no places to post public spam to, it would be perfectly safe to replace the manual approve system by an automatic one with a confirmation code sent to email address. Simply register and play, just like old times.
  • Tournament prizes: The existing system does not work too conveniently - prizes can be only specified in the tournament description and when more winners share the same final position, it is not clear how to distribute them. BrainKing 3.0 will contain a brand new functionality of prizes to make the process completely automatic and understandable to all.


• Lightweight version (for cell phones, WebTV etc.)
  New BrainKing will use a lot of JavaScript dynamic features to make the site look a little more modern. And although all contemporary browsers should handle it properly, it is likely that non-computer devices (WebTV, cell phones etc.) will not be capable of it. Therefore, the simplest possible version of BrainKing pages would be created along with the normal one and users of the mentioned clients should be automatically redirected there.

This is just a short version and definitely does not cover everything, mostly because some things may still change. However, it should, hopefully, answer questions that I am occasionally asked and give everyone a chance to add a comment with own suggestions. Of course, everything is guaranteed to be considered, not implemented.