BrainKing Knowledge Base

As a big fan of an artificial intelligence and automatic systems (my dream is to live in a luxury house with its own brain), I like to add features which make BrainKing less dependent on my input and more self-sustaining entity. One of the last parts of the site, which had to be completely processed manually, was the system of interviews. And, in order to make our life easier, the improvement of the day solves this problem once and forever:

• A new link Interviews has been added to the Information section of the left menu column, so the Interviews page is no longer buried under the discussion boards and can be easily accessed from any page.


• The interview moderator (which is currently pauloaguia) can select a new user to be interviewed and add his/her to the list displayed at the Interviews page. When it is done, the interview entry is marked open and every registered user can submit his own questions for the interviewee (using a simple form).


• Each open interview has a deadline - after that, BrainKing automatically switches the interview to the answer mode, which means that no more questions can be added/modified and the interviewed person starts to submit the answers.


• The answers are not visible to public until all questions are addressed. When it is done, the interview moderator makes the final check and if everything is all right, he releases the completed interview.

I hope this change will make the interview process smoother and without any more terrible delays (caused by me, of course ). And it is allowed to use BrainKing smileys at the questions or answers.

In order to make BrainKing fellowships more flexible, a new rank called Little Boss has been recently added. As the name suggests, it should work as an assistant to the Big Boss who still remains as the fellowship owner. The purpose of a Little Boss is to give other members all necessary permissions to keep the fellowship alive, even in case of the Big Boss inactivity, because fellowships which are not maintained, are good candidates for a deletion. The following list summarizes the functionality:

What a Little Boss can do:

• Invite new members to the fellowship.
• Accept or reject membership requests.
• Change a rank of every member except the Big Boss.
• Create game teams and change team ranks of all members.
• Create fellowship tournaments, ponds and stairs.
• Send team match invitations to other fellowships and accept/reject them.
• Send group messages to all fellowship or team members.

And what a Little Boss cannot do:

• Change the fellowship name, description or flag.
• Change the Big Boss.
• Delete the fellowship.

I hope that I haven't forgotten to mention some features. Furthermore, the Little Boss rank is the first candidate for a Big Boss replacement if BrainKing decides that it should be done. Practically it means that if a Big Boss is not active for more than 60 days, BrainKing automatically promotes the Little Boss to the Big one and the former Big Boss would be degraded to a manager.

And yes, only one Little Boss can be defined for a fellowship.

I have just spent a few minutes searching the word "brainking" on Google (which is my favorite kind of relaxation when I want to use my computer but don't want to do anything meaningful), and after browsing through first 10 or 20 pages of results, I have noticed that BrainKing is included in one (or maybe more) site called "internet gambling directory".

That makes me think what the purpose of it really is. Shortly said, BrainKing is not a gambling site and we don't plan to make it a gambling site, it is not possible to play for real money on BrainKing and as long as we own the site, it will not be possible at all. However, there are sites which offer to play games for real money, and I mean games supported on BrainKing as well - backgammon, for example. And since some BrainKing pages could contain advertisements that promote gambling sites of this kind (and poker sites or online casinos), it might be good to put a little enlightenment to it.

All gambling related links which can be found on BrainKing sites belong to the category of paid advertisement and all of them link to external pages which are not associated with BrainKing at all. It is not possible to play for real money on our site. There is only one case which could be somehow close to this issue - tournaments with entry fees. But the fees can be applied in Brains only and it is just Brains what can be won as a prize - and Brains cannot be exchaged to real money, only spent on BrainKing for a membership etc.

A positive consequence of our presence in an internet gambling directory is that people who look for gambling sites can get to BrainKing by a mistake and maybe they will find out that playing just for fun is a good way how to spend a free time anyway.

As I have posted 4 months ago, there are statistical data which say that more than 90% of all e-mails is a spam. And since the most of modern e-mail clients use sophisticated anti-spam filters, spammers must be kind of inventive to make up new ways to overcome them and deliver their trash to poor readers. Funny thing is that I have recently received a spam which has been pretending to come from BrainKing itself, having a "From:" header set to info@brainking.com, which is our "system" address to notify users about new account approval etc.

Furthermore, the spammers has probably found out that sending their ridiculous offers at attached images is not very effective anymore, so their new tactics against anti-spam filters is to use pdf files instead. It may work because many people know this Adobe format as a totally harmless one and don't hesitate to open it.

I would like to highlight that BrainKing never sends any e-mails with attachements, especially not with images, pdf files or executable programs. Moreover, BrainKing never sends HTML e-mails, just plain text ones. It means that if you ever receive something like I have just described and the sender pretends to be from @brainking.com domain, it is a spam. If we decide to change our e-mail policy, it will be officially announced first, as any other important issue.

I am glad that the recent article about the BrainKing's refund policy has been accepted as a descriptive and understandable one and there will be no more problems with that. Actually, there were no problems at all, except one or two cases in the past.

The article.

However, I have omitted a small detail which could cause a little misunderstanding, so let me post a short addition - no refunds can be applied for prize tournaments. It means that when someone creates a prize tournament, the prize (e.g. 1 year Brain Rook membership) must be provided before the tournament is started, which is the standard rule for BrainKing tournaments, in order to make sure that the winner would really receive it. And once the tournament is started, the prize (30 Euro in this case) cannot be returned to the tournament creator, not even within the 14 days period.

But I am sure that this entry is just about something what every prize tournament creator is already familiar with. Moreover, it is a nasty rainy weather here in Prague today.

During the first years of BrainKing's existence we had been facing small problems with accepting payments from foreign users who had wanted to become paying members ("foreign" means "outside Czech Republic" ) because the major payment gateways had not supported our country. That's why the representatives had been established on a voluntary basis - cheerful and willing enthusiasts had been working as proxies for their local community, collecting money from them and sending it to us.

This is, fortunately, the past.

Although the representatives did a great piece of work and helped us a lot, I am glad that I don't need to bother anyone with it anymore, which is also the answer to the question "what happened to the representatives and will you list them again?". The answer is no because BrainKing currently supports five different payment methods, including the most popular PayPal or MoneyBookers. The only official way to pay for anything on BrainKing is through our shopping cart system and we take no responsibility for any other options. If new payment channels are added, they will be officially announced first.

Yep, one more note to the multilingualism and related issues. As you probably know, the former name of our site was BrainKing.com because we hadn't planned any language or domain expansions in October 2002 and it had been quite popular to give web-based companies the .com suffix to their names.

The contemporary situation is different, of course, and the official name of the site is BrainKing and nothing more. However, the older title was used in many localized texts before and it is not an easy job to pinpoint all such occurences and fix them (the SQL gurus can suggest a find-and-replace string function but the problem is not related to the English texts only - some languages use inflections of nouns or even more horrible grammatical rules).

Please, if you find a "BrainKing.com" text anywhere on the BrainKing site (except the BrainKing.com discussion board name which has another reason for it), send me a note. The past must be buried.

From time to time I receive a message from a paying member on BrainKing who has just decided to stop playing games on our site and since his membership subscription has not expired yet, he asks for a partial (or even full) refund. Although such cases are more rare than regular, we created our own refund policy and published it on the Paid Membership page some months ago. However, since it could be left unnoticed, let me post it again here:

14-DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. If you have decided that the purchased level of membership is not what you have really wanted, you have the right to ask for a full refund during the first 14 days of your subscription. Since BrainKing's higher membership levels contain many features and services which cannot be canceled or returned after they are used, the refund claim is valid only if it is clearly evident that you have not taken advantage of any features or services which are specific for the corresponding membership level.

Why these restrictions? The reason is simple and obvious - BrainKing is not selling any goods which could be returned because, for example, where you become a Brain Rook, create 50 tournaments, start 400 games and open 2 fellowships, it would be very distasteful to other users to delete all these tournaments, games and fellowships, in order to cancel the previously used benefits of the higher membership level. I still think that the policy is fair enough and there is no need to change it.

I know that this entry is a little paradox in its very inside because it is targeted to non-English speaking BrainKing community but the blog is in English only (which is another issue to be addressed later anyway). On the other hand, it will be a good reference for me in the future.

BrainKing is actively used by players from many countries and a significant part of them does not speak English. Which is not a problem at all (and it is the reason why BrainKing is translated to so many languages) and we are glad to be open to a big number of nationalities, but it becomes a problem when someone discovers a bug and wants to file it to the Bug Tracker - unfortunately in Estonian, Chinese, Norwegian or any other language I don't understand.

The current solution is to ask people to use the particular localized discussion board instead (BrainKing.ee, BrainKing.cn, BrainKing.no etc.) and ask a person who speaks English and reads the same board to post the translated report to the Bug Tracker, if the issue is identified as a real bug (otherwise it can be easily resolved in the mentioned discussion board without any language barriers). The future solution could be more sophisticated (a wizard system to describe a bug by many localized options to choose from) but it is just in a stage of consideration. And maybe when we really finish and release something like that, there will be no bugs on BrainKing at all.

The smileys are, whether we like it or not, an important part of BrainKing, because we can see them almost everywhere on the site (including the recent additions of smileys in fellowship names) and I am sure that many people cannot imagine BrainKing without smileys now. Moreover, I know of several BrainKing users who became paying members mostly because of the ability to use smileys.

Since the smileys system can be customized in many ways, it might be a little confusing for new users who are not familiar with all features it provides and usually don't know what to set/change and where. The current status of the Settings pages (regarding the smileys options) is:

• Settings / General contains the Show smileys switch which is kind of hidden at the bottom part of the page and many new paying members are not aware of it at all. Which is usually the reason why they see the number codes instead of smileys and don't know how to turn them on.


• Settings / JavaScript is the home of all other smileys options, a user can set if the smileys popup window appears when a mouse cursor is hovered or clicked, which selected smileys would appear to choose from, etc. And since all these functions require JavaScript to work, they were put to this category.

Shortly said, the first sub-page includes the "read" settings (whether you would see the posted smileys or not) and the second one is designed for the "write" settings - functions related to the posting process.

The question is, would be better to create a special Settings / Smileys page just for smileys? I think it would solve many current problems and since we might add more smileys options in the future, there would be enough space to put them to.

The word "smileys" has been used 15 times in this article, including the title and this last sentence.

The Week of Sorting Options contains a new addition which has been requested yesterday (yes, some suggestions can be implemented really quickly). The list of finished games at the Profile / Finished games page is sortable by all columns, so it is now, for instance, very easy to find out the best ratings of the selected player.

And since there are fellowships which have been containing smiley codes in their names for many years, I have decided to make them visible at last (and several people has already detected this change and improved their fellowship names as well ). The smiley-enhanced fellowship names should be displayed on all related pages, including team tournaments, fellowship tournaments/ponds/stairs etc. Such smileys are always resized to the height of 12 pixels, otherwise they could make the links too distorted.

Who likes to customize BrainKing pages (those which can be customized), can start to play with two new sorting options:

• Ratings page - the list of games and top rated players can be sorted by all available columns. If you, for example, want to know the absolutely highest BKR value, sort the table by Best BKR column and descending (green arrow points down).


• Team matches at the fellowship main pages. Since the growing number of team matches among fellowships makes the match lists not too well arranged, the tables of running and finished matches can be sorted by any column as well. Furthermore, the table of finished matches highlights the ones which were won by the selected fellowship.

BrainKing contains many tables and we don't want to make all of them sortable but if there are some important ones where the sorting would be a significant improvement, I'll be glad to consider it.

The recent launch of new team tournaments has started a hunt for quality players to make the teams. And since the number of tournaments is 16 at this moment and it is likely that even more team tournaments will be created this year, it might be a little cumbersome to inform the team captains about the last events, if you are a Big Boss and want to make sure that all teams will be ready before the deadline.

The new small improvement can be found at the main page of your fellowship. If you are the Big Boss and there is at least one team captain available, the link Send a message to all fellowship captains will appear below the list of all teams. Clicking this link would invoke a page where the actual message can be written and send. And, of course, each captain receives only one copy of the message, even if he is a captain of more teams of the selected fellowship.

People are varios, different and omnifarious, especially BrainKing users, and what is ideal for one player, can be annoying for another one. Take the time control system, for instance. It features two main time control types - time per move and time for game. The differences and described in detail at BrainKing's FAQ page and BrainRook articles, so we won't write about them once more. As some old timer might recall, the time for game (Fischer's clock) option was added as a reaction to complaints about slow games using vacation days, so we created a time control with no vacation days at all, beyond some more features.

The point is that unexperienced BrainKing users usually overlook the time control information while accepting a game invitation, which can lead to a sudden timeout when a player, who believes to play a classic time per move game, makes a move and does not open the game page in next 14 days. The new option, which has been added to the Settings / Game filter page on BrainKing game site, tries to solve this problem, at least partially. From now, everyone can choose if he wants to get game invitations with Time per move only, Time for game only or All time control types. Are you tired of Fischer's clock deepnesses? Simply select the Time per move only option and nobody will be able to invite you to a Fischer's clock game anymore.

Goodnight and sin no more.

First of all, we want to thank everyone who participated in the yesterday's red code action and I hope that all of them enjoy their bonuses. A nice amount of free membership months is always a pleasant gift. And since we don't extend actions with limited time periods which are announced in advance, this opportunity won't be offered again, until a special and rare event happens.

Second, a small new improvement has been added today. If you play many ponds at once and want to postpone the selected one(s) while making moves in the rest, simply use the button Play later which works the same as for normal games. This feature affects only paying members because nobody else can run around the pond on BrainKing.