BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

There is one important thing which is often omitted (or totally ignored) by many webmasters, but it makes a significant part of the overall site success. I am talking about the first impression of a new user who comes to the site and wants to make a decision if it is worth staying for a while and, which is better, worth registering or even subscribing to a membership.

Yes, I have to admit that BrainKing is more focused on real game enthusiasts than ordinary people who just pass by. Honestly, when a coincidental visitor spots the BrainKing's entry point (login page), he is hardly attracted by an outstanding design and breathtaking graphics, or some useful information which wouldn't be the same every day. Which is exactly what needs to be changed.

I would like to summarize my proposal of the new entry point of the site (besides the new design which must be done anyway):

• Move the login and register forms to the top of the page and put them to a single box, in order to be easier to find and occupy less space of the page.
• Write a better description of BrainKing features and make it up with simple examples.
• Add a dynamic content - randomly selected game positions, excerpts from most recent public discussions, tables of running team tournaments, etc.
• Add RSS feeds from other BrainKing sites - BrainKing.info and BrainRook.com, maybe more in the future.
• Post some user testimonials - I guess we don't have them at all. Or at least they are not written anywhere.

There are several benefits of this approach:

• A new user could find the site more attractive and think there is something interesting inside, whether he plays board games regularry or not.
• Registered users would have a reason to visit the login page regularry, even if they usually log in from elsewhere (other BrainKing pages).
• Search engines like a rich and dynamic content and could give BrainKing a better page rank.

If you have your own suggestions, please post a comment here.

I have added a simple SGF generator to the BrainKing site. If you play a game of Go (any type), you should see a new link download SGF code at the notation column of the game page. When you click on it, you should download a text file containing the game notation in SGF.

Please note that I never used this notation format before, so my implementation is probably full of bugs. Feel free to report them, either here or to the BrainKing's Bug Tracker.

Our goal is to provide all known notation formats of all supported game types, which can be imported to an external software. I guess the MAT format for backgammon games should be the next one but I don't want to promise any details. It is just another line in my TODO list.

I have noticed that several people have a little problem when they want to pay a membership for a friend because they don't use the correct way on the Paid Membership page and simply pay for themselves instead. Which means an extra work for me and also could mean a little trouble after we make this process automatic (however, PayPal drives me crazy because they still didn't make our account able to receive funds although they had promised to do so 3 weeks ago!).

Okay, let me describe the order process step by step:

• Go to the Paid Membership page and find the target membership line, then click on the change link next to your user name at the Membership section.
• Use the Find user form to locate your friend's ID.
• After you successfully select yoru friend's user name, you should see the Paid Membership page again but with the friend's name instead of yours. Click on Add to cart button and use the rest of the standard way to place the order.

I feel very sleepy now, so I will post the important topic (which was promised yesterday) tomorrow. Shortly, it should be about the entry point of the BrainKing.com site, which is usually referred as Login Page.

I guess I was talking about a real work yesterday. Ha ha! Very funny. Actually, there is always something to do because the BrainKing site is never finished, but I didn't work today at all. Guess what, I have been playing RuneScape for more than 8 hours, in order to relax and perceive an inspiration (by the way, a MMORPG is a great way to make a mind totally twisted for a while). Speaking of that, I've got an idea how to make BrainKing even more unique (and bizarre?). It will take some time to implement but since I've already started, I think it could be finished. Zark!

Anyway, we have recently added more RAM to our application server, which means that BrainKing could be a little faster now. If you don't think so, there are probably more things to influence the total gaming experience :-D, but, in general, more RAM always means the better.

The last note for today - there is one part of BrainKing which was never improved and it is one of the most important features of the site. I'll try to write more about this issue tomorrow.

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the writer's mind.

I knew that something was wrong but I was not sure about it. Now I am. Actually, it was not a critical problem but since several users have pointed it out, I have made a simple solution:

• The game called Ataxx, which was added some days ago, is not the real Ataxx as it is widely known. It is called Assimilation and this is the reason why all your started or finished games of Ataxx were suddenly renamed to Assimilation. It is only a visual change, nothing else.
• The real game of Ataxx was added today as well, increasing the total number of game types to a nice number 90. There is one difference - a piece can make L-shaped knight moves too. Please read the rules on BrainKing.com site for details.

Okay, enough confusion for today. Time to do some real work.

I guess a lot of users have faced an unpleasant situation of the site being inaccessible for a while (10-20 seconds) many times during yesterday. Regarding this issue, we have spent several hours investigating and finished the work installing a new kernel of the system, along with more optimizations, specifically tailored to our needs.

As I can see now, the site is performing very well and the monitoring tools don't report any strange activity/inactivity, so I hope the source of the problem has been successfully found and removed. As a matter of fact, such things can occasionally happen and it's just a drawback of too complex contemporary systems and configurations. Don't panic. Whatever happens, we always find a solution.

By the way, you might have noticed that Google ads were removed from the site yesterday. It was a quick action of myself after a long and not very nice conversation between me and Google representatives because i had (and still have) a bad feeling this company does not treat all its partners equally. I am going to write a detailed article about the whole case because it could make a good example how this kind of business really works and if we can warn other site owners before they make an agreement with Google, we can be satisfied. (Have you seen The Rainmaker?)

First of all, there is one current issue of several users having small problems to access the BrainKing site. I was told by our serverhousing company that they should be testing and changing some routers to upgrade the global connectivity. Although this action happened several days ago, there could be small negative consequences, causing occasional downtimes of the line (not the site), especially for users outside Czech Republic. I hope it will be stabilized very soon, anyway it's not a serious problem.

The real purpose of this entry is to highlight several points related to the e-mails which are sent to BrainKing administrators either through the Contact Us page or to the info@brainking.com address directly:

• As it is clearly written on the Contact Us page, BrainKing administrators speak only English and Czech. Therefore it makes no sense to send us an e-mail in Turkish (for example) although BrainKing is fully translated to this language, because we would have to ask for a help with the translation anyway. I can say we also understand easy questions or requests in Russian, Polish, French and German but we would respond in English anyway.
• If you want us to help you, please try to describe your problem as much as possible. A short note "it doesn't work", "I cannot login" or "what is my user name" is really not enough. I wouldn't write about it but since I receive such e-mails almost every week, I guess it cannot hurt if I drop a note about them.
• When you write a direct e-mail to info@brainking.com, please make sure you use a descriptive subject for it, otherwise you risk that your e-mail won't pass through the anti-spam filter and will be lost before it can reach us.

Enough for today, I guess there are no other important things about this subject now.

I have posted a short article about automatic link replacements yesterday. And, as always, a new feature brings out a demand for more new features. That's why I have decided to extend the possibilities and this is the (current) final list:

• A tournament URL http://brainking.com/en/Tournaments?trg=13439 would be changed to The Magnificent 128.
• Posting http://brainking.com/en/Pond?g=2650 will cause a change to Weekly Rain Pain XXXIII.
• If you post http://brainking.com/en/ShowGame?g=1, BrainKing will change it to Five in Line (Liquid vs. Fencer).
• A profile link http://brainking.com/en/Profile?u=2 converts to Liquid.
• If you make a fellowship link http://brainking.com/en/ShowFellowship?fid=2, Blizzards appears as a replacement.

Feel free to post new ideas about this subject.

You might have noticed that when you post a tournament URL to a discussion board or private message, BrainKing automatically converts it to a clickable link containing the tournament name. This feature was added more than 6 months ago and seems to be useful, especially for those who are not familiar with HTML tags.

I have improved this function today a little. Now it works not only for tournaments, but for ponds and games as well. For example:

• Posting http://brainking.com/en/Pond?g=2650 will cause a change to Weekly Rain Pain XXXIII.
• If you post http://brainking.com/en/ShowGame?g=1, BrainKing will change it to Five in Line (Liquid vs. Fencer).

And if no conversion happens, it means the tournament or pond or game was not found, most likely due to a malformed URL.

I have forgotten, as usual, to create Stairs for all new games which have been recently added. Now it is fixed. I guess a smarter "add new game" procedure could be developed at last because BrainKing's features are too complex to be remembered. And the TODO list is one entry longer now.

By the way, we have probably broken a new internal record today because a new game of Ataxx has been implemented and released the same day as it was requested. Mostly thanks to its simple rules. Anyway, even simple games can hide a deep strategy. Just try it out.

I don't know why it took so long (who the hell develops this site? ) but finally, it is here. A list of captured pieces, which was missing at Jungle and Espionage games on BrainKing, is working at last. And, of course, since Espionage is "hidden-until-revealed" type of game, if you capture a piece which was not recognized by a Spy before, it will appear as a question mark at the list of captured pieces.

By the way, based on a request of long time Espionage players, I have made two more additions today:

• Two new variants Open Fast Espionage and Small Fast Espionage (without volcanoes) have been created.
• Since the number of Espionage variants has reached the number 5, they were moved to their own game category, called Espionage and found on the New Game page.

I guess you have noticed a small "parchment" icon at the top of some game pages. In order to make the game related articles by our users more visible, the icon appears if the particular game articles already exist on the BrainRook.com site. Since several active authors regularry send very nice and interesting articles which are worth publishing and reading, I would like to make as good publicity for them as possible.

I want to improve this feature in the future, e.g. to show a notification if a new article of this game appear, make the icon location customizable, etc.

If you face a situation of the site being slow for you sometimes, please read this article carefully. I will try to describe the possible sources of the problem and suggest a solution for the particular issues.

There are three main categories of the site performance problems - server side, network side and client side. And there is only one which can be influenced by us - yes, the server side, i.e. the BrainKing computers themselves. The other ones are out of our reach and must be resolved individually, with the user's assistance.

Let me summarize that:

• Server side - it was a big problem several years ago, when BrainKing had been running on a very slow database server and was almost permanently overloaded. Furtunatelly, it is not an issue anymore (for more than a year), BrainKing code was optimized many times and the site maintains its optimal performance itself. Moreover, when a speed problem occurs, the site either resolves it with a help of its own watch-and-recover utilities or sends an alert to the administrators who make the proper actions manually.
• Network side - since BrainKing is an international site and the servers are located in Prague, Czech Republic, users from other countries (or even other continents) can occasionally face a situation of pages being loaded slowly or incompletely, which is caused by a network problem "somewhere on the way". The recommended solution is to disconnect from the internet and reconnect after a while to check if the speed is better. If not, contact your ISP and ask if their line abroad is not overloaded.
• Client side - this is the most commom source of the mentioned problems. A computer can be infected by a virus or a spyware, which steals the line bandwidth and makes the connection slower, or does other nasty things and negatively affects the web browser's behaviour. Or the browser is allocating too much memory of the computer resources and the system spends more time to resolve this situation than to react on the user's actions. Etc., and so on. The recommended solution is to apply a reliable antivirus and/or spyware removal software, fix the possible browser problem or try to connect from another computer to see if the problem is really caused by the former one.

I will add more points to this list when I am aware of more related information.

BrainKing is a site which must live on something because everything costs money and we have no sponsors who would send us a million dollar check every month just for nothing. Shortly said, there are two main sources of our income:

• Paid membership
• Advertising revenues

This article is related to the latter one, mostly due to an event which has recently happened. One of our users reported that BrainKing was displaying an advertisement of a company which does not deliver ordered goods after receiving a payment (read some customer reviews here). Since BrainKing wants to provide only good and reliable information, we had a serious problem.

How to solve it?

First of all, I would like to describe (shortly) how the advertising system on BrainKing works. Most of the ads are delivered by Google AdSense program which analyzes a page content and shows relevant advertisements (because there is a better change they would attract a visitor's attention). However, the publisher (BrainKing) cannot specify which advertisers would be actually displayed, we can only set several relevant keywords to help Google choose the field of interest.

Fortunatelly, there is a solution which is called Competitive Ad Filter. It is a list of site URLs or domains which would never appear on BrainKing as an advertisement. Right now, it contains one domain - the already mentioned epcbuyer.com because all other partners seem to be good and reliable and there were no other complaints.

Now, at last, we come to the point of this article. If you happen to see an advertisement of a company which has a bad reputation, don't hesitate to report it immediately. We don't have time to check everything at once and any help would be very appreciated (and awarded). Let's make the good information visible and the bad one removed forever.

All right, there was some delay caused by more important tasks, but the Tips contributed by our users have been launched at last. You can find them on the usual place at the right column of most BrainKing pages, along with the current tip's author name and a new link show all tips which points to the Tips of the day page, containing all tips we have at the moment.

Feel free to send more tips. And don't forget to check the existing tips first, in order to avoid possible duplicities.

Well, this is a short entry, isn't it? On the other hand, there is nothing else to day about the tips, except a recent suggestion to show a random tip on the Main Page just after logging in. It can be made as an option in the future.