As we have announced in the Server News, BrainKing is currently under a process of optimization and tuning, in order to improve the overall performance and response time, mostly by rewriting certain functions that cause too much CPU load. There is nothing to worry about - everything is working OK and many players will probably notice no important changes. Anyway, I would like to clarify what exactly has been modified and why:

• Maximum number of games shown in one list has been reduced to 100. The reason is obvious - some people, who are quite reckless in joining more tournaments than they can handle, end up with thousands of started games and it is neither logical nor wise to display all of them at once. 10 years ago, when BrainKing had been launched, we didn't expect that someone would start more than a couple of hundreds games, but since the reality is far too different, time has come to do something about it.
  It means that if a player has more than 100 games to play, only the first 100 would be displayed, along with links to other pages containing the rest.


• Game lists are sorted by time left and it is no longer possible to change the column to sort by. After doing a lot of tests and optimizations, it turned out to be the most effective solution, regarding the site speed and fair user policy. I know that some people will probably miss the feature to sort games by, for instance, opponent names, but a similar result can be easily achieved by using the opponent and game type filter above the game list. The same filter has been added to user profiles where all started games of the particular player can be found.

After implementing the mentioned changes, a couple of small bugs appeared, as usual:

• Move and stay here function does not work and simply redirects to the next game. This is a known issue caused by overlooking one detail in the code.


• Play later feature does not work as expected. Actually, it was never totally bug-free and I planned to rewrite it a long time ago. Right now it is deactivated and its new version will appear soon.


• Some other Move and go to ... functions do nothing at the moment. According to the database, most of them are quite rarely used, so should not do too much harm if they are not active for a while. I want to observe how the implemented changes are performing and will finish the rest in a couple of days.


• Red numbers next to player names at the Friends online column don't appear unless you are viewing the main page (and sometimes not even there). This feature was dependent on another one that has been removed as an ineffective one, so it needs to be redesigned first.


• Number of games shown on the main page option from Settings / General page is ignored. It will be reactivated after removing 200, 500 and all values.

I hope I listed all important things here. If not, please leave a comment.

Just a side note, I am glad to confirm that BrainKing's December action was successfully and automatically started by BrainKing itself and many people have already caught their bonuses (most of them are lucky enough to get the 100% (red) one).

• Vacation
  • Problem: The vacation system is too complicated. It utilizes weekend days that can be changed occasionally and it allows people to set or clear vacation days in their calendar. We observed that these features produce too many different situations which usually lead to a confusion and sudden loss of games by timeout.
  • Solution: In order to make the days off as simple as possible, it will be no longer possible to change weekend days - they will be fixed to Saturday and Sunday for everyone. Furthermore, the calendar will be removed completely (or reserved for another purpose) and BrainKing will use vacation days only if it is necessary - i.e. if the particular user's games should timeout. In other words, the automatic vacation will be the only way to spend vacation days and it would be enabled for all players of all membership levels.

When the new version of BrainKing is ready, the vacation system will be properly introduced with a good description and examples of typical situations. I am sure that people will get used to it because it is really simple, transparent and, what is the most important, does not allow any kind of cheating.

You might have noticed a new link in the left column of BrainKing pages, called Events, just below Message Box. Starting today, all messages generated by the system (game resignation, tournament invitation, winner notification etc.) will be shown on this page, while the former Message Box would be used for personal messages only.

The reason is simple. I've made a fast lookup and realized that only 10% (or less) of all messages are actually sent by BrainKing users and it's easy to overlook them in the middle of the system ones, especially if you play many tournaments and don't visit BrainKing for 2 weeks. Furthermore, many people don't even read system messages and delete them without opening - and I cannot blame them. Sometimes, I do it too.

The Events page is probably not flawless because the whole structure of system event generation has been fully rewritten, in order to make it compatible with upcoming new version of BrainKing. Any suspicious behaviour of missing functionality can be reported to the Bug Tracker, of course.

Please don't take this short article too seriously. In fact, I have been pleased by the number of BrainKing visitors increase and because I installed Google Analytics code to BrainKing pages a little more than a month ago, the displayed percentage growth is calculated against only 1 or 2 test visits:


However, it still shows that BrainKing has more than 140,000 visitors a month (unique, more or less) which is surely a great number and higher than I expected.

Although my respect to Google products is, uh, all kinds of good and bad (based on our experiences from the past), their Analytics tool is quite useful, providing a lot of interesting data. For instance, let's see a decreasing ratio of Internet Explorer users:

Internet Explorer	40.02%
Firefox	37.40%
Chrome	13.10%
Opera	5.26%
Safari	3.43%

Well done, Mozilla and Google. More than 50% of BrainKing users seem to believe in your products.