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 to a short trip because BrainKing is a mature site and should be able to maintain itself without our surveillance. Of course, it's never that easy. When I wanted to make the last check before leaving, I've noticed the site is suddenly down. You might have noticed a short (30 minutes) outage of the BrainKing.com site today. Fortunatelly, it wasn't our fault, it was actually the server housing main line which was interrupted by the service provider, and the BrainKing server was still running, although nobody could access it.

A negative thing is that such events can happen anytime and there is nothing we can do to avoid it. However, we can at least anticipate the possible consequences. BrainKing already has a kind of a simple artifical intelligence and it can invoke the correct actions even without a human assistance. For example, it continuously monitors its own performance and if something goes wrong and the site get stuck, BrainKing restarts itself and after a while comes back again with a fresh power. Which is a useful feature, especially if something goes wrong at 3:00 a.m. when all administrators usually sleep and nothing can wake them up.

And here comes the good news! Starting today, BrainKing is able to detect the inactivity of users, which happens if the site is down or cannot be accessed, and if this inactivity lasts for more than 1 hours, it automatically disables the internal task which periodically (every 10 minutes) checks all started games for possible timeouts. What does it mean? It the site gets unreachable during the night and the problem is solved after 4 hours, all users who could not play their games in this downtime period would probably lost some of them due to timeouts. Which cannot happen anymore because the timeouts would remain disabled until a human administrator comes, detects the problem source, fixes it and re-enables the timeout task manually.

And, like yesterday, there is a small improvement - a new action move and go to the next game with Fischer's Clock has been added as well.

Starting today, every new tournament has its own discussion board which is created after the tournament is started. Although all users can read the content of the discussion board, only the particular tournament players can submit their posts. There is a new link Discussion at every tournament page, just above the section tables, which points to the tournament discussion board, and the number of total and new posts is displayed next to it.

Although this feature does not cause a breakthrough, maybe some users will find it handy. There is an open issue whether to close such discussion board its tournament is finished or not, but at this moment there is no special rule applied - the board simply remains as it is.

By the way, a small addition of the move and go to the next game of this type and player has been implemented yesterday because there are people who claimed it was absolutely necessary to add.

The Feature Requests discussion board and my message box are full of requests to add new games or variants to BrainKing. I support it, BrainKing is mostly a game site and I want to implement as many different and interesting games as possible.
The most usual questions which emerge after posting a request of this kind are:

• What are your priorities of implementing the list of requested games? Are some games more important than others and will be added sooner?
• What game type are you currently working at?

All right, the answers follow:

• There are no priorities, I take all game requests equally important. Mostly because we have several communities which prefer their favourite game - backgammon fans want more backgammon variants, chess enthusiasts recommend interesting articles from the ChessVariants.org site, checkers players are waiting for international checkers and many national variants of this game, etc. Not to mention new games which are not implemented on BrainKing yet. It is not possible to do everything at once (and BrainKing maintenance requires to do many other tasks) but, as I already mentioned, all feature requests are noted and will be considered.
• The current game task which blocks all other ones is to fix the checkers model because it causes a small bug at Turkish Checkers and other checkers variants cannot be added until this issue is resolved. Fortunatelly, it is not a big problem and when I am back from holidays, the things will move faster.

BrainKing is an international site and provides a wide collection of popular board games from many different countries of the world. That is, however, not a big surprise and definitely not the reason why I write today's article.
I have just received a September 2006 issue of Kinsho, a Japanese Shogi magazine. It was kindly sent to me by our user takodori and, what is interesting, one of its articles is about BrainKing. Actually, I don't understand Japanese, but I have found words BrainKing and Fencer within the Japanese text and I had also provided an interview several months ago, about BrainKing itself and Shogi popularity in Czech Republic.
Speaking of a popularity of Asian board games (Xiangqi, Shogi, Changgi, etc.) in our country, I wish it would be better. The biggest obstacle I am aware of is that a novice player sees that all pieces have the same shape and the only way to recognize them is to remember the Japanese picture (which is not easy if you don't know this language), unlike in Western Chess where each piece has its own shape. BrainKing provides a set of westernized pieces with hints of possible moves which are easier to get familiar with but, well, it becomes useless when you want to study Shogi books. I guess a short course of Japanese wouldn't hurt. The game is worth it.
By the way, if you like Shogi, don't forget to visit this interesting blog.

I have received several reports from our users about a recent problem with Internet Explorer that crashes when some BrainKing page is loaded. Since I never faced such a situation and everything works correctly for me, I have made a short research to locate the problem source. This is what I have found:

• BrainKing is innocent, no page contains anything unusual what could make a browser to crash. Furthermore, there was no significant change to its structure for several years.
• The problem is probably caused by the recent Microsoft patches, downloaded from the Windows Update site. Please read this page for details.
• If the problem does not disappear, I recommend to use another browser (Firefox, Opera) until Microsoft releases a new patch to fix it.