BrainKing Knowledge Base

I have received an inquiry about the recently updated list of paid membership advantages, more precisely about the point 3.2. This is what the mentioned section says:

"Paying members can upload a small 40x50 picture (which is called icon) to their profiles. Icons are shown next to the player's name on many important pages - game pages, discussion boards, private messages etc."

The problem is that the section deals with icons only, so what happened to user photos? (bigger 200x300 images)
Actually, the Paid Membership page is correct and only the small image, which is displayed on game pages, discussion boards etc., is going to remain as a privilege for paying members. User photos will be replaced by user photo albums, which will allow any registered user to upload more images, organize them in folders (albums), share them with other users etc. It is a logical decision, making this feature more flexible and, as a side effect, solving another long term problem.

I've been too optimistic again, so this feature is not released yet because it's not fully finished yet. However, if nothing unexpected happens, it should go live very soon.

Many things changed since the BrainKing beginning in October 2002 but one of the most important source of information (never changed) was the list of benefit of a paid membership.

Well, actually, there was no such list before, just a short note at the Paid Membership page and a very outdated table comparing different membership levels. And now, at least the second sub-page of the mentioned page (called Details) has been completely rewritten to reflect the contemporary status.

Please find it here: Paid Membership / Details

This is just a not officially released version because it is likely that I have omitted some details (who is supposed to remember ALL members only features?). If someone things that something important is missing, please let me know and I will add it.

And some small screenshots should be added too, I guess.

BrainKing has a good protection against robots who sometimes attempt to create fake accounts with links to porn, illegal or other types of inacceptable sites - as already described several times in the past, all new account requests are manually checked and accepted/rejected by administrators, so the chance of recognizing a robot activity is really high. However, when a malicious human, which is usually much smarter than an ordinary robot, wants to misuse BrainKing services for his own profit, it is often detected after a certain "bad" action is made. Luckily, there is not much harm to do since BrainKing does not allow a user to embed dangerous HTML tags or scripting code to any kind of messages, so there is no reason to be afraid of being infected by adware, spyware or other types of "wares" just be viewing BrainKing pages.

The point of this article is to bring an enlightenment to situations where a fake BrainKing account sends tens of messages of "I am a poor African girl and I need your help" type (it is also known as Nigerian Letter). The best way to protect oneself (and others too) is:

• Never click on suspicious links contained in a personal message from an unknown sender.
• Report this event to me as soon as possible. BrainKing administration console contains a functionality which, when it's triggered by an administrator, instantly disables the offender's account and removes all messages sent by this user from the database (which means that the messages disappear from message boxes of all attacked recepients).
• Never panic. Such things happen and the best protection against them is to know what to do and, which is more important, what NEVER to do.

By the way, there is some very interesting information to read about modern Nigerian spam and botnets (what is a botnet?).

I have just added a static version of the BrainKing Chat Box. Static means that it contains no JavaScript and does not refresh itself automatically. It is mostly a redundant feature but I have decided to make it anyway, because:

• Some web browsers can have problems with JavaScript code or JavaScript is disabled in them for security reasons.


• Some people want to chat without displaying the chat box at the top of all BrainKing pages.

However, if the standard BrainKing Chat Box is working for you, I do not recommend to use the static one, because:

• As I have already said, there is no automatic refresh (unlike the JavaScript version which is automatically refreshed every 2 seconds), so if you want to see new messages, you must refresh the page manually or click the Submit button.


• Neither special codes (/a, /m, /r etc.) nor smart "click-and-fill" features work in the static version.


• Any new features will be added to the JavaScript version at first. They might be reflected at the static one later, but it is not guaranteed.

Oh, I have almost forgotten - the mentioned page can be found at the left menu column, Statiscics section, and is called Chat room. It is also the only page (except BrainKing home page) where the JavaScript chat box is not displayed.

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.

The number of BrainKing discussion boards is not small and it is not easy to keep a good overview of all of them, especially when a user posts something and forgets to check the particular board for responses. There is a "favorite boards" section at the right column of BrainKing game site pages but although it shows the current numbers of new messages (in a red font), important replies can be quickly buried if the board is too frequently used by other contributors.

A new feature, which could solve this problem, has been requested several hours ago and quickly implemented, so everyone can take advantage of it now. There is a new option at the Settings page, called Notify me if someone replies to my discussion board posts. If you set it on and, as it says, someone writes a response to your post, BrainKing will send you a notification to your message box. The notification contains a link to the corresponding discussion board, the name of the reply author and even the reply text itself. Of course, if you want to follow up with the topic, you will not reply to the notification but simply click one of the provided links, locate the post and do the usual.

Of course, this feature works only when a "real" reply is posted - it means that the user who replies to your post must do it using the "Reply" button or the "box" link, otherwise the system cannot recognize the original post. BrainKing is smart but not that smart yet.

"The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world's highest-paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they're doing, day in and day out, twenty-five thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged. We need to take back the airwaves as a sphere of mature conversation and dialogue about our common future."

Duane Elgin, "On Simplicity and Humanity's Future, IONS, Noetic Sciences Review, December 2002

This is neither about a Hong Kong film of the same name, nor a popular internet service, the point of this article results from the recent improvement of BrainKing's bug tracking feature. Since the Report a bug at this page is available at all BrainKing pages now, it obviously helped many people to find out that there is something like a bug tracker (which is good) and when something is working "strange", it must be reported immediately, without thinking about it first or trying to find a solution (which is bad). Ergo, I have decided to publish a list of events/topics/behaviors/issues which should never be posted to the Bug Tracker:

• Pages are loading slowly - it is never a bug to report. Please find the solution here.
• Some images are not displayed - ditto, please refer to this article.
• My opponents are not moving - as long as the defined time control allows it, nobody is obliged to make game moves faster. Who does not like to wait too many days, should accept invitations with a shorter time control.
• The dice are not fair - some clarification of this very popular myth can be found here.
• I have finished a game but my rating chart position has not changed - please read the Position Task paragraph of this entry.
• Advertisements are annoying - it is usually reported by non-paying members who think that advertisements which are included in certain BrainKing pages are too obtrusive. The solution is easy - you can either upgrade to a paid membership level and get a right to disable all advertisements (new options will appear at the Settings page) or stick with a free membership and get used to it.
• My opponent should timeout but 24 hours has been added to his time instead - your opponent is probably using the automatic vacation feature. Please find more information at BrainKing's FAQ page.
• Smiley window does not appear - either this feature is disabled at your Settings / JavaScript page or your browser does not allow to run JavaScripts at BrainKing site. Please check both Settings page and a security panel at your browser's options.

Yes, I know that it might be better to include this list to the Bug Tracker page itself, mostly because the majority of BrainKing users do not speak English, but I want to wait until I am sure it contains all important information before it is passed to the translators. Meanwhile, a link to this article will be added to proper BrainKing pages instead.

One more note - since today, when a new bug is reported, BrainKing stores the reporter's user agent value and the language version of BrainKing he is currently using. The reason is that we can easily retrieve this important information from the bug database instead of asking the user afterwards.

About a year ago I posted a short article about Liquid's FON hotspot and since he has recently persuaded me that it is a good thing, I have connected and published my own FON node as well. Actually, it brings no advantage to foreign people but if you ever decide to visit Prague and go astray to the scope of my signal (and have a WiFi powered smartphone with a Skype client), you can call home for free, using my home internet connection. For those who never heard of FON, please find some information here. It is a very cool project, being supported by Skype, Google and similar big and important companies, and it is supported and promoted by us as well.

I am already tired now, so I have decided to publish the "BrainKing overview" article tomorrow, it would make no sense to do it today at all costs and omit half of important details because of my sleepiness. Meanwhile, who wants to experiment with loading time of BrainKing's Main Page and game pages, can try out a new option Use the "lightweight" version of BrainKing (disables many extra features but could speed up loading of pages) which can be found at the Settings page. Please note that it is mostly in a beta or pre-release status and it has not been officially released yet, so it might do no visible changes for you, but I think it's a good start and there are still many possibilities to make it better and more usable.

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.