BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

This month is almost over and the time has come to announce a new special action for September. I wanted to do something original, instead of free months, membership bargains and other usual stuff. As I have already suggested before, it will be about articles.

BrainKing is full of experienced players and game enthusiasts. I always wanted to give them a good chance to share their knowledge with other BrainKing users and get something valuable in return for their effort. The September Action is the solution! I want you to write an interesting and original article (one or more) which is related to BrainKing - for example, it can be about your personal experience with our site, it can be about chess history, it can be about contemporary world backgammon tournaments, it can be about shogi theory, it can be about scrabble - there are endless options to choose from. And what is in it for you?

• I will pay you for that. Depending on the article quality, you will be given 50-200 Brains to your BrainKing account. A good writer can easily earn enough Brains to convert them to a free membership.
• Since the article can contain live links, it can make a good publicity for you, your own site, your interests etc. The articles will be published on a new site (associated with BrainKing), so there is a good chance to get many, many readers.
• You will help to drive more traffic to our sites as well - which is the best award for all of us because everyone can benefit from it.

Now, the rules follow:

• If you want to submit an article and earn the Brains, please send it either to fencer@brainking.com or to my BrainKing's message box. You can also create an account on the article site and submit the article draft yourself.
• By submitting the article, you give me a permission to publish it on our article site. You will keep the right to publish it on other places as well, we don't require an exclusivity.
• The article must be your original creation, it is not allowed to copy and paste some already published source.
• The article should be written in English because the article site will be in English too. If you don't speak English well, try to find a kind volunteer who would translate it from your native language.
• The article cannot contain any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content.
• You won't be insulted if I reject your article due to its low quality and ask you to rewrite it.

By the way, it is not the only benefit of the September Action on BrainKing.

I have added several improvements to the BrainKing's Message Box features:

• Mark all messages read - you will find this option at the bottom of your message list, just above the Delete All button. It can be useful if you leave the site for a week or two and after coming back, you want to clear the red number as fast as possible, without deleting the messages. It was requested today by a user who returned to BrainKing and found almost 1000 new messages in the inbox.
• Delete and Next - it is a new button which appears at the single message page, next to the Delete button. Clicking on that will delete the current message and return the next message to read.
• Mark Unread - another new button which makes the opened message marked unread - it will appear a a new message in the message list. It is useful when you want to handle the message later and not to overlook it.
• Archive - I guess this is the most important new feature of the day because it will move the message to the new Archive folder, when it will be stored and can be accessed from the Message Box page - there is a new link Archive next to Inbox and Outbox.

Although the message system is to be improved globally, I have decided to put these small enhancements online because many users can find them handy. And nobody knows when the brand new system would be released.

The midnight (and 5 minutes) is an important breakpoint in the membership lifetime because it is the time of a check whether the membership has expired or not. Since it is a critical action which must be absolutely fail-safe, it only sends me a notification and the actual terminations of expired memberships are still performed manually. On the other hand, this process was working correctly for several years, so the time has come to make it automatic. Although the automatization of processing expired memberships is not launched yet, it will probably happen soon and when it is done, the requests "please give me 5 more days and don't turn me back to a Brain Pawn, my payment will be delayed a little" will stop working.

If your membership is about to expire and you want to renew it, please make sure you do it in advance, not during the very last day. It is safer.

Although this issue does not belong to the most frequent questions, it occasionally appears in my message box, so it would be better to clarify it once and forever. This short article is about upgrading a BrainKing membership from Brain Knight to Brain Rook. The problem and its solution can be summarized into two main points:

• Question: I have accidentally purchased a Brain Knight membership today and I would want a Brain Rook level instead. What can I do?
• Answer: Since your membership has started today or several days ago, you can easily upgrade it by paying the difference between Brain Knight and Brain Rook fee, depending on the subscribed period. For example, if you have paid for one year Brain Knight (20 Euro) and the corresponding Brain Rook level is for 30 Euro, you must send another payment of 10 Euro (30-20) to complete the upgrade. The easiest way to do it is to use the Donation form on the Support Us page to specify the required amount. Yes, I know the form does not support all payment methods at the moment, but it will be fixed soon.
• Question: I paid for a Brain Knight membership 7 months ago and I would like to upgrade to a Brain Rook now. How can I do that? If I pay the full prize of Brain Rook, what would happen to the remaining 5 months of my current membership?
• Answer: This situation can be solved only by purchasing a normal Brain Rook membership which would start immediately after the payment. And since we don't want you to lose the already spent money, the rest of the current Brain Knight membership would be used to extend the new one (after some conversions are made). For example, if you purchase a year Brain Rook membership and you still have 5 months of Brain Knight level to use, it will be (approximately) converted to 2 extra months of the new Brain Rook membership. The result is, your current Brain Knight level will be cancelled but you receive 14 months of the new Brain Rook level, instead of 12.

I have registered BrainQueen.com and BrainRook.com domains several weeks ago. But I won't reveal their purpose because, although I already have some plans with them, they can change. However, there is absolutely no connection to the secret points.

By the way, the September Action on BrainKing will be about articles.

As you probably know, BrainKing supports several options to send a payment for a membership. It is a must-have because we have to live on something, upgrade our hardware, pay for the server housing of our machines, etc. And since we have customers from all countries of the world, we must provide as many possibilities to pay online as possible.

Good news is that PayPal finally decided to make an important change to their policy:
"Beginning September 14, 2006, registered PayPal users in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Thailand will be able to receive funds into their PayPal accounts as well as withdraw them to a local bank account."
It means that we will be able to handle PayPal payments directly at last, without a help of third parties, which should mean a faster process of membership activation and, which is more interesting, a chance to make this process fully automatic.

Actually, I was hoping that Google Checkout would be our default option but it is currently available for United States merchants only.

I like plugins. It is a neat way to extend the site functionality and BrainKing uses them as well - every game model is a plugin to the existing framework. The point of this short entry is to announce a support of opinion polls at BrainKing.info blog site, because the BrainKing.com's opinion poll system is still inactive due to several pending issues, not resolved yet (lack of time, etc.).

Well, I have created the first poll to test the system and it is about a possible newsletter of the BrainKing game site. I have some ideas how to write it, but before any works starts, I would like to know if it is necessary or not (not to mention it would mean a lot of more writing work for me ).

Please don't hesitate to vote in this poll and let's see what comes out of it. If you are not registered on BrainKing.info site yet, you will probably have to do it first.

If you come to BrainKing regularry, you have probably noticed the site inactivity for about 8 hours tonight. Although local users was not much affected by this event (if they sleep in the night ), our friends from United States, Canada and other countries of that time zone must have waited for us to wake up.

You might ask why didn't the automatic recovery system take the action and put the site back online immediately? Well, it was one of the rare situations when a simple restart doesn't help because the problem appears at the database system level and must be fixed manually. However, it doesn't happen too often (once-twice a year) and everything is fine and working now. And, of course, no data have been lost.

There is also one positive consequence - the previously announced site inactivity checker has detected the situation correctly and turned off the timeouts for all games. I will turn it on tomorrow, if nothing goes wrong.

Today, there are only several minor improvements I want to announce (and a short scheduled outage):

• Our server housing provider plans a short outage (which affects BrainKing as well) to 31st August 2006, about midnight. The duration should not exceed 15 minutes, so it's not a big issue, not even to test the recently added feature of automatic disabling the timeout checker.
• Fellowship pages display inactive members with a grey background at the particular fellowship page. It can be a useful feature for Big Bosses who want to remove members which don't visit BrainKing anymore. A player is marked "inactive" if he does not log in BrainKing for more than 30 days.
• Paying members can easily switch from games to ponds and vice versa, when they submit a move. A new form containing the available ponds/games will appear to select the target.
• If you create a private tournament with more games, you can send a single invitation for all supported games at once. The improvement is available at both locations - the tournament page and the profile page of the player to invite.

I like Google. Many people say that Google is collecting too much information about us while browsing the web and it is a violation of our privacy, but I don't think there is a reason to panic if you do nothing bad. From my point of view, Google is a good friend of mine, because it helps to increase our revenues and also gives me regular tips how to customize their rich features for BrainKing.

If you use Internet Explorer with the last version of Google Toolbar, you might find the recent BrainKing improvement interesting. Just an hour ago, I have created a BrainKing button for the Google Toolbar which you can easily install to your browser now:
Install BrainKing button to your Google Toolbar
When it is done, you should see a new BrainKing button at the toolbar (see the attached screenshot). Clicking on the button redirects you to the BrainKing login page and if you open the submenu (clicking on the arrow next to the button), you should receive links to the most recent entries of this blog. To summarize it, you can access both BrainKing.com and BrainKing.info sites in this comfortable and user friendly way, and when I release an upgraded version of the button, it is possible to download the update by a simple click as well.

By the way, I have installed a Google Sitemap Plugin to this blog system yesterday and after I submit this entry, the sitemap.gz file (which helps Google to index our site faster) should be generated. Let's see if it happens.

This morning I've decided to take a break and go