BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

According to our Christmas promise, we have released the basic version of the auto pass feature for Backgammon games (I know it would be useful for Ludo as well but I don't want to implement it for everything at once until the feature is thoroughly tested and marked bug free).

Well, what is it about? Backgammon players know that when no legal move is available, the player must pass the move to the opponent and this action is noted as "pass" at the game notation. Since there is no other choice in this situation, it makes no harm when such events are handled by the server itself, without the player's intervention. It can speed up the game a lot, especially if the opponent is not the fastest player and plays his games only once a week.

BrainKing likes to give users a choice and the auto pass is not an exception. There are many people (including me) who don't want the site to make moves on their behalf and prefer to click everything manually, even if it is more time consuming. That's why the auto pass feature is not activated automatically for all backgammon games, but the players must make an agreement first:

• Player 1 create a backgammon game invitation and uses the Select this option if you want to use auto pass option.
• Player 2 opens the game invitation and finds the offer The opponent wants to use auto pass in this game. Select this option if you agree with it.
• If he wants to play with auto passes, selects the option, otherwise leaves it unchecked and no automatic moves will ever surprise him.

There is one more important rule - the auto pass is activated (in a no-move position) only if no message has been sent to the opponent with the move which creates the auto pass situation. The reason is that players could easily and accidentally break their in-game conversation if several auto passes suddenly appear with no warning.

This is not to be another article describing all disadvantages and pitfalls of this most recent Microsoft web browser (I am sure that anyone who is interested in this subject can find many useful information elsewhere). I would like to summarize the reasons why I don't recommend to use Internet Explorer 7 with BrainKing game site:

• Speed - unlike Firefox, Internet Explorer does not show a page until it is fully loaded, no matter how big the page is. It can cause a significant degradation of gaming experience, especially on slow internet connection. Browsers which display a page continuously, as the data come from the server, are always preferred.


• Standards - Internet Explorer (or Microsoft) defines its own "standards" which don't follow the official W3C standards of web design in many aspects. Since the upcoming new version of BrainKing is using advantages of CSS and standard JavaScript, an unexpected behavior is expected (that's a nice phrase ) if it is viewed with Internet Explorer 7.


• Runtime errors - BrainKing's client based functions (popup smiley windows, context menus, etc.) are tested and debugged with Firefox and other standard compliant browsers. It has been already reported that Internet Explorer 7 throws runtime errors although there is no logical reason for it, and I don't intend to customize BrainKing code to this crap.

And for those who are not sure how to get the alternatives, please follow these links:

• Firefox
• Opera

The last thing - BrainKing is not using any Microsoft proprietary technologies like ActiveX controls or native scripting functions, thus there is absolutely no reason why to play through Internet Explorer at all costs.

By the way, it might be an interesting action to give special advantages to users who decide to use BrainKing with anything but Internet Explorer. But I am not sure about the details at this moment.

It is not easy to remember when I created something for myself on BrainKing. However, after several hours working on kind of complicated task for BrainKing, I have decided to take a rest and make something simple, useful and not too time consuming, speaking of the programmer's job. The Notepad has been improved.

Notepad is a paying members only feature and allows BrainKing users to store and organize private notes of any kind. Well, "organize" is not the best word to describe it, at least it was not until today. Since I write notes very often, mostly because I keep my BrainKing TODO list there, the list of notes has become not well arranged, especially when I wanted to find something. That's why the system of folders has been implemented.

It is possible to create any number of folders, give them descriptive names, move the notes from one folder to another one, etc. The job is definitely not finished, I am sure that I should add a search system, similar to the one of discussion boards, and similar innovations, but it is not a bad start. At least the chances of losing my notes about feature requests are much lower now.

• June 2005 - it seemed that people really wanted to have BrainKing localized to their native languages because four more full translations appeared in June 2005 - Esperanto, Romanian, Swedish and French. Should I add something? Only that it was far beyond my former expectations.


• July 2005 - there were several scheduled downtimes, mostly due to application server conversions (which could mean almost anything and I guess that we were recalculating BKR histories again because it's nice to have accurate values if the previous attempts were no 100% positive successful ).


• August 2005 - Xiangqi and Shogi were implemented, initially with westernized pieces only, the native ones were added later.
  After a week we increased the number of supported games by five - Legan Chess, Knight Relay Chess, PahTum, Hasami Shogi and Great Chess, the last one with a kind permission of Christian Freeling, the game inventor. It was a good feeling to deal with a nice guy who did not need to make problems with licenses, patents and other annoying things because we already had bad experiences with such gothic behavior in the past.
  We removed the 2700 limit of BKR maximum because many players reached it and had no motivation to play on, and we also added a rule of removing inactive players (6 months for paying members and 1 month for the rest) from the BKR charts. It was necessary because we had to solve a problem when a user occupied the top positions and stopped playing, so nobody could replace him.
  International wire transfer payment option was added. The total removal of Gothic Chess on 1st January 2006 was announced.

Banner ads are something what nobody likes to see, except the advertisers who want to promote themselves in this way. However, as I mentioned several months ago, it makes one of many parts of our revenues and it would be a useless income loss if we don't have them.

The point is that many BrainKing users find them obtrusive and annoying and would prefer not to see them at all. And that's another reason (or a side effect, more like) why it is not a bad idea to invest to a paid membership. The flashing and blinking banner ad system is our new aggressive way to make people know the advantages of their higher membership levels because once you become a paying member, you will see new options at your Settings page. Simply find the section Show banner ads and uncheck all checkboxes which mark the banner positions. When it is done, BrainKing guarantees that you will be no more bothered with any kind of unsolicited advertisement.

Who doesn't like the ads, doesn't have to see them. 2 Euro a month (the cheapest Brain Bishop level) can really afford everyone.

It is not a rare situation when I have a look at some player's profile and find a description of "please no chess invitations" type. I know it can be annoying if, for example, a player wishes to play only backgammon games but still receives invitations to loop chess because the opponents either don't read his profile or simply ignore it.

Since today, it is not a problem anymore. You can find a new section at the Settings / Game Filter page where you can define games which you wish to play and nobody will be able to send you an invitation to the types you disallow. Practically it means that the game types, which are filtered out, will not be displayed at the invite this user to a game form at the Profile page, or as links invite next to the game types at the Finished Games section of the Profile page. Furthermore, if someone uses a search form to locate an opponent at the New Game page sequence, the users which don't allow the selected game to play will not be shown at the result list.

There is one pending issue - the JavaScript invitation buttons () are not reflecting this change because it must be rewritten and optimized first and it is not an easy task to do. However, if someone tries to invite you to a game you don't want to play, he will be shown this warning:

You cannot invite UserName to play this game because it is not in his/her list of allowed game types.

Followed by a list of allowed games which can be used to select another game type to invite this opponent to.

Although it hasn't been officially announced, I have added a tiny link Test Mode at the Main Page (after you log in BrainKing), just next to your user name and score. This link provides an easy access to the new site design which is currently in development but at least one page should be fully functional, so you can test the new Main Page at different web browsers to see if it looks nice with them.

The new design is actually providing two levels of view - the main (with the nice castle towers) and the simple (without them) because several people have already reported that they would prefer more space at the central part (between the towers) even if the graphics is reduced to minimum. The links To simple style and To castle style switch between them.

Please keep in mind that the new design is not finished. Take it as a preview.

I have also created the Hasami Shogi Reincarnation prize tournament, in order to bring this game back to life after the rules change (improvement). The winner will receive 1 year Brain Rook membership for free. Don't hesitate to sign up, the deadline is on 24th February, only 2 days left!

BrainKing is still growing. Yes, we like it. We have more than 41,000 registered users and the other numbers related to this growth are increasing as well. And we cannot simply ignore the fact that some BrainKing pages become worse readable because of too many information.

At last I have found a time to implement one important (and useful) feature which was requested a long time ago. There are not many people who would play all 102 supported game types regularly and when they visit the Waiting Games page, they must browse through many pages to locate games they are interested in. That's why the Game Filter is finally here.

What is it about? If you go to the Waiting Games page on BrainKing, you should see a new link Change the game filter at the page top. It points to a new Settings page where you can select games you want to see at the Waiting Games page and all other types will be filtered out. It is a good thing for a player who, say, plays Backgammon variants only, so he will select just Backgammon checkboxes at the Settings page and he will be no more bothered by other public game invitations.

By the way, I have just made a reset of Top search phrases at the Press Monitoring page because I want to collect fresh data due to some experiments I am currently doing on BrainKing. Purely statistical ones, there is nothing to fear about.

According to the new BrainKing design being developed (by the way, thanks for all reactions to the yesterday's article, I am really glad to know how many people like the castle theme ), I have improved the JavaScript tooltips which are used for message previews, board posts previews, tournament table popups etc. The tooltips are smarter now - you might have noticed that they don't disappear when the mouse is moved out from the link, so you can easily click the links inside a tooltip and, for example, go to the selected tournament game without opening the tournament page first.

There are also two improvements of the popular game of Logik:

• White player can see his last move score even if black did not finish his own move. It is useful when you want to see how good your current guess is and the result is visible only for you.


• After placing the first piece of the current move, you can easily place another one of the same color, if you simply click another blank space of the current row. It could speed up the game a bit.

All right, as I have mentioned yesterday, the Hasami Shogi rules change will be activated on 21st February 2007. If you are currently playing a game of this type on BrainKing, you should see a news alert on your game page. There was a shorter timeframe than it usually is because Hasami Shogi (due to the former lack of balance) was not played too much.

And when this change is active, I plan to promote the new rules with a special action.

Now, something less optimistic - I have been told that Kontera links (the ones with a double underline) work bad with Opera browsers because they totally mess up the text when a mouse cursor is hovered over them. I have already filed a bug in the Opera bug tracking system, but since that system is not open to public, the bug status cannot be tracked. Let's hope they will release a patch as soon as possible.

Anyway, if you like to experiment and test, go to http://brainking.com/en/NewGameList and check how it looks at your web browser. It is an unfinished version, of course.

And let me finish today's entry with something funny - this cute video demostrates how programmers can develop their applications with no keyboard or mouse, just taking advantage of Windows Vista speech recognition feature. I wonder how long I would be able to develop BrainKing in this way before my brain leaks out of my ears.

After a weekend spent in a nice Western Bohemian nature (with no BrainKing development environment and very slow internet connection - but who needs it in a time of rest? (me!)) there is not much to write about tonight, expect the optimistic fact that I am looking forward to continue the BrainKing work tomorrow. However, there are several points I would like to mention:

• The game Hasami Shogi, as it is currently implemented on BrainKing, is absolutely unbalanced, which is wrong. Luckily, a nice and simple solution has been offered a few days ago - if a horizontal line of five connected stones is built, such constellation would not be considered as a win. In other words, if we leave only vertical and diagonal winning positions (or capturing all opponent's pieces) as the options to win, the game would become interesting and playable again. This change proposal will be officially announced within a day or two.


• The new PayPay (not PayPal!) option of online payments on BrainKing, although it is the best solution especially for Slovak users, needs to be tested more because I want to understand all details of its capabilities. Let's make it a little bit more popular - everyone who uses PayPay to purchase a membership or renew an existing one in February 2007 (this month!), will get 3 free months of the same level, if the purchased subscription is for 6 months or more. Only 10 days left! February is a short month.


• There are still some slots left for the second part of the February Action on BrainKing. I am pretty sure that the action won't be extended.

• March 2005 - this month started a heated discussion about nationalities, discrimination etc. Why? Because 13 people made an agreement to sponsor the Brain Maharajah tournament which would award a winner with this unique membership level. The only "problem" was that nobody but users from Czech Republic could sign up for this tournament, as the tournament's creator condition. Well, the affair was a little exaggerated. Everyone who wants to sponsor an event with a prize, has the right to define specific conditions, no matter how restrictive they can appear to be. And since the tournament is already over and the prize membership had expired as well, everything is all right.


• April 2005 - 6th April 2005 was marked as the Day of Internationalization because we released the first non-English and non-Czech localization of BrainKing. Thanks to the great work of the translators, BrainKing was fully translated to Portuguese which one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It was the first step to make our site open and available to non-English speaking people. Yes, I had to rewrite many parts of the source code, in order to make it ready for more than 2 languages, but it was definitely worth this effort and I wish to have BrainKing translated to as many languages as possible.


• May 2005 - the number of discussion boards was reduced by combining the boards of game variants into one, in order to keep the board system better organized and prepared to the launch of new language localizations. Which turned out to be a good idea, because four BrainKing translations were released in this month - German, Slovak, Turkish and Dutch. Way to go!

Pente players have probably noticed that a new link download DSG code has appeared at the top of the game notation column for all pente variants games. This format is very similar to PGN (for chess games) and allows anybody to download pente games and use them in a software which supports the format.

As an addition, paying members have an option to download more games in DSG as a zip file, using the simple form on the particular game rules page.

And, since it would be a little risky to release more complicated changes/improvements when a weekend starts, let's enjoy some new smileys instead:

• December 2004 - we have announced a Christmas Action of a 1 free month to every new subscription (or a renewal), just like in previous years. People like to get Christmas presents. I was also honored by a visit of David Soucek (son of a famous Czech writer), known as Bad Bishop on BrainKing, who came from Vienna (Austria) to meet the BrainKing creators personally. (actually, he was visiting him mum who lived in Prague as well) And he had told me about an interesting multiplayer game he was used to play with friends on a chat site. After a consultation of the rules and some experiments, the game Run around the Pond was added to BrainKing, getting a good popularity almost instantly.


• January 2005 - there was a funny "deja vu" effect caused by a misconfiguration of BrainKing's resource files, so it was using the backup database instead of the live one for several hours. Not a big deal but I learned to check all changes twice before uploading them. And it was another opportunity to improve the BrainKing system of new releases.
  Pro Five in Line and Swap Five in Line were added. These two variants were requested by experienced Five in Line players who were bored by the classic version when the starting player can always win. We have also enabled the creation of own Ponds for members with Brain Rook or higher membership level. After two weeks from this announcement, another two new games were implemented - Hyper Backgammon and Fisher Random Chess.
  As I can see, there were many news entries in January 2005. The last one was about adding an option to move banner ads to the bottom of pages (for paying members only) and the Server News system improvement, applied on Fellowship News as well.


• February 2005 - Due to planned upgrade to a higher version of our database, we decided to improve the password encrypting algorithm (because the former one was no longer supported) and asked users to change their passwords, in order to make this change activated. As usual, many users ignored this appeal, so when their passwords stopped working, they flooded my mailbox with requests of password renewals. Not a big surprise. We are used to this.

You might have noticed that I like to use BrainKing sites to try out new technologies and an interoperability of them. Furthermore, I like the users to play with it. The game site (BrainKing.com) was usually the main playground but since the blog site (BrainKing.info) is showing an incredible growth of traffic (see the previous posts about the site statistics), I have decided to choose this one.

On the other hand, it can appear on the BrainKing.com site as well, but can be turned off on the Settings page (paying members).

All right, what is it all about? The observant readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed that I have completely removed all banner ads from the site, because they have turned out to be a waste of time and page space, regarding the drastically low income they could generate. Moreover, they used to be always the same, and who wants to see the same advertisement for the 100th time?

Just a few days ago I have started to experiment with in-text contextual advertisement links provided by Kontera. You might have spotted a couple of new links with a double underline at the recent entries of the blog. When you hover your mouse cursor over them, a short description of the company which provides the advertisement appears, and if you are interested in it, you simply click and visit their site. If not, just move the mouse cursor elsewhere and the advertisement silently disappears. Simple and effective.

I like this technology because it gives people a choice. The classic banner ads don't - you must see them, whether you want to or not. And although some text analysis gives funny results (for example, Firefox Extension is translated to Hair and Extensions Studio, most likely because Kontera says that it can take up to two weeks to finetune the text analyzing algorithm for our site), it can occasionally bring up interesting information. I have just spent about half an hour browsing the historical articles of this blog to observe which words or phrases would be turned to clickable links.

And, as the bottom line, I am glad to add a new article to the Advertising on BrainKing category.