BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Recent changes of BrainKing features

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.

Simplicity is the key (part 3)

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.

Gaming is a passion for so many people around the world. Games ranging from chess to Spin Palace roulette are played online regularly. If this is something you could get into, there are hundreds of websites offering you the chance to do so. Don't miss out!

Separation of system messages

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.

One million percent

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.

Prize tournaments redesigned

I am sure that some active people who create prize tournaments on a regular basis have already noticed that, but since no official documentation has been released yet, I think it is time to produce a little clarification of the subject.

I should also note that this article is related to BrainKing prize tournaments with no entry fee (or freerolls, if I use an online poker terminology). It does not affect Brains tournaments.

Well, what is actually changed?

It is no longer possible to mark tournament as a prize one, in general. Instead, tournament creators will see a new form called "Add prize" that allows them to associate any number of prizes with 1st, 2nd or 3rd final position. For instance, it is possible to offer 1 year Brain Rook and 1000 Brains to the first position, 1 year Brain Knight to the second one and 100 Brains to the third one.

Instead of specifying prizes in the tournament description (which is not reliable and hard to translate to all supported languages), all tournament prizes are displayed at the tournament page in a well arranged table. A tournament with at least one prize added this way will be automatically marked as a prize one and highlighted in the tournament list.

At the time of writing this blog entry, the system is in a preview status, allowing just adding the prizes. It is still necessary to contact me, regarding the payment, and after all prizes are paid by the creator, I change the tournament manually to the green status, which means that BrainKing will automatically start it after its deadline. The automatic processing of prize payments will added as soon as possible. It will be kind of complex task because there are several ways to pay for prizes - some of them can be paid by Brains only, others must be purchased through our shopping cart system, etc.

I have noticed that a couple of people have already tested this system and nobody reported any bugs. It is a good news. Since the number of prize tournaments increased during last month (probably due to recent Black Rook action), I hope this improvement will become handy and useful.

BrainKing and IPv6

I have just noticed a lost and found draft I made 4 months ago, so I have decided to publish it at last. It is not a big one - in fact, it only informs about BrainKing being prepared for IPv6 protocol, which is something that will be a must-have in a couple of years.

OK, let me make a few notes:

If you can use IPv6 at your computer, feel free to test BrainKing on this address: http://[2001:1568:b:101::6]

If you never heard of IPv6, you can find basic information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv6

And if you still think this article is nothing but a technical hassle, please don't hate me.

There is one thing I really love about it. BrainKing has been already given a IPv6 range of /64 type, which means that when the old protocol is fully replaced by this one, we will be allowed to use exactly 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 different IP addresses for our projects. I guess it should be enough for even larger companies than BrainKing.

September action of Black Rooks

I have been thinking, thinking and thinking of any possible improvements of our September Action that was announced in August and successfully tested as well. Improvements that would be fair to everyone.

I didn't come to any conclusion, so let's follow the test week pattern. With a small bonus.

The discount is individual for every user and makes 10% for every year of normal Rook membership purchased in the past, up to 60%. BrainKing uses the shopping cart system history of orders to calculate your discount, which means that only orders placed since September 2005 are counted.
Other registered payments can, when added up, qualify for an additional discount if the total amount is equivalent to the current Brain Rook year subscription price. For instance, if you already paid for a year Brain Knight level (24 Euro) and a 6 months Brain Knight membership (14 Euro), it makes 38 Euro in total - greater or equal to 36 Euro - so BrainKing will increase your discount by another 10%.
The payment must be received in 72 hours after the order is placed.
The action will be active for a week (7 days), starting from 1st September 2010, 9:00 a.m. GMT+2. The Paid membership page will inform you about it.

Everything will be properly announced tomorrow.