BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

This is a reminder to everyone who has missed the yesterday's announcement - in order to finish the bonus color code month with the very last special offer, this whole day is dedicated to the Cyan Code - everybody who places an order of 1 year or longer membership subscription today and completes the payment in 72 hours, will automatically receive 75% bonus to the purchased membership for free. And, as we have already mentioned, we don't plan to make a similar offer in the future, at least in several upcoming months, so if you want to catch this opportunity, do it quickly. Check the light bulb on the Main Page of the BrainKing site for the exact time range of the last bonus action.

And since the icon gallery is quite a success (I like it very much), I have decided to create a similar tableau of fellowship flags. You can find in on the Statistics / Active flags page or click the link Active flags on the Fellowships list.

The BrainKing's era of giveaways is coming to its end, at least for several months, because we don't want to spoil our users too much. And we want to finish the April Action with the Cyan Code (75% bonus to a year or longer membership) during the whole Monday 30th April 2007 as the absolutely last chance to get 75% bonus to the subscribed period for free. For example, if you order 4 years of Brain Rook level, you will get another 3 years for free - 7 years for the price of 4. Furthermore, we don't plan any membership related action for May.

Please don't forget that the server time zone (GMT+01:00) is always used for all actions. I think the flashing bulb on the Main Page would show the action time range in your time zone as well.

It is nice to find a link to БрейнКинг while looking for any BrainKing references on the web. I wonder if it's okay to transliterate official names from Latin characters to other alphabets, but I am pleased to see it. How would it be written in Chinese or Farsi or Thai or any other non-Latin writing system?

If I am not mistaken, we have 10 BrainKing domains now (and I am sure we are not finished yet). BrainKing.it is the newest one and it is recommended to be used if you prefer to display BrainKing pages in Italian.

It might be interesting to search a game site which has more than 10 domains and 20 language versions (our current status). Does it exist at all? I know it's not the only measurement of quality but at least it means that we take our business seriously and want to be open to everyone.

And something different - there is a site called Games and Software Sites - Top 100 where I have registered BrainKing two days ago. The site rules say that the top 100 site chart is driven by a number of incoming clicks through a given link, so let's see if it works - who wants to support BrainKing with a minimal effort, please click here:

http://www.top100gamesites.com/scripts/arp/rankem.cgi?id=Fencer

I think this kind of promotion is allowed, so don't hesitate to do it and pass the link to your friends as well. Thanks and enjoy your time on BrainKing.

The twentieth localization of BrainKing is here, out, up, running and released! When I was posting about the Scandinavia, there was a comment about a not-absolutely-full coverage because of Denmark, but hey, didn't I mention the peninsula? I think I was right.

The language no. 20 is Danish and the entry point for new Danish users is http://BrainKing.com/dk. Our thanks fly to all translators, as usual.

Back in my high school days I always liked to walk through the city and observe graduation photographs (although the mine looked terrible and I doubt anybody would recognize me on it now ). Anyway, BrainKing's Statistics / Active icons page contains something similar and I think it's a nice collection of user images. It displays the most recent icons of all paying members and if some of them seem to be outdated to you, try to refresh the page with Ctrl-F5.

Imagine a situation when you invite a friend to BrainKing, he successfully passes the registration process, starts to use the site on a daily basis and then, he suddenly disappears.

Which is, of course, impossible at all. Since we don't delete any accounts on BrainKing, it is more likely that your friend has changed his user name and never told you about that. It leads to a confusion, panicking, flooding my message box etc. I know it should have been solved a long time ago. Luckily, at last it is now.

Starting today, when anybody changes the user name, a new link show previous names next to the ID line on his Profile page will appear and clicking the link will show all names this user has been using before the last change. When I connect this feature to the Player List search system, no user name information will be lost anymore.

And we have started the 10th page of BrainKing smileys. Enjoy them.

Our server housing provider plans to perform an outage of its network due to a hardware replacement. This action will affect the accessibility of BrainKing servers and scheduled on Friday 4th May 2007, 23:00 GMT+01:00. The company representative says that the downtime should not exceed 2 hours and since BrainKing will detects this situation automatically, the game time will be suspended for the following 24 hours after the action is over.

This is just a preliminary announcement. I will post a reminder on time.

Mancala has reached the 11th position in the started games chart on BrainKing and we have just added a small improvement to its visualization model. If it is not convenient for you to calculate beads in the holes every time you want to make a move and the "mouse over" tooltips are not what you want to use as a hint, there is a new option on the Settings / Mancala page (which is new as well). You can specify a minimal number of beads to show a number hint (it is set to off by default) and when this option is activated, a small number (reflecting the number of beads in the corresponding hole) will appear at the top right corner of the hole cell, if the number is equal or greater than the value on the Settings page.

An important note for those who use Firefox (which is good) but still the 1.5 version (which is not too good) - the official support of Firefox 1.5 will end after mid-May of this year. Since it means that no new security updated will be released for the 1.5 version, I strongly recommend everyone who didn't do it yet to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 as soon as possible. It is really worth it.

Okay, it is only one keyboard shortcut but also the most important one, so it deserves to be mentioned in today's blog entry. If you are a paying member and use a JavaScript capable web browser, you should see a new link Enable keyboard shortcuts above the Message field (text area) on discussion boards, game pages, Notepad and similar pages where a text is to be posted or sent. Clicking this link will show the Settings / JavaScript page with a new option Use Ctrl-Enter to submit a text. If you enable this feature and press Ctrl-Enter keys after typing your message, it should submit the form, just like when a submit button is clicked. This feature is known from instant messaging programs or e-mail clients and is very useful when you want to submit a text quickly without looking for a mouse.

This new feature still can be a little buggy (e.g. it doesn't work with the Rich Text Editor), which is the reason why I have made it optional only. If you experience a strange behavior, don't hesitate to disable it.

The Profile / Finished games page now contains a Total row below the list of finished game stats. Combined with the link show this player's game with me only it can be used to display the total score with a selected player. Since this small improvement has been requested, I guess it can be useful.

Google is the most valuable brand in the world. Well, it was only a matter of time to happen. BrainKing still has many lesser goals to achieve.

No, we are not giving anything for free today, unless a light bulb appears on the BrainKing's Main Page. Since my old notebook (with a little better parameters than the listed one) has recently collapsed, which is not a big surprise after 4 and half years of its extreme usage, Liquid has an idea to sell it through an auction. At first, I have taken it as a joke - but, on the other hand, why not? The second alternative is to throw it to a trash bin.

All right, is there anybody who would like to own The Laptop Computer which was used to develop BrainKing for more than 4 years? Liquid says it only needs to replace the hard disk and he will do it for free. I think it can still be used for a standard work if you don't plan to run Windows Vista on it. Well, if there is an interest, I can make an eBay auction and see what happens.

And, I have been playing with some JavaScript a while ago and implemented a little test code on the Notepad page (ergo, accessible to paying members only). I was always missing a neat feature which is widely used at instant messaging programs, the ability to submit a post/message without a need to click the mouse button. So, if you are using Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 or Opera 9 (it might be working with other browsers but I haven't tested them yet), try to open your Notepad page, type some text and press Ctrl-Enter.

After all possible bugs are hunted down and fixed, we can add it to discussion boards and similar places as well. As an option, of course.

One of the most visible advantages of a paid membership on BrainKing is that the user can add a small icon (40 x 50) and a bigger image (200 x 300) to his profile, in order to express his personality or due to any other good reason. The icon is shown on game pages, discussion boards, personal messages etc., which is much better than just a plain user name. And, as we already know, BrainKing provides a smart solution for users to upload the mentioned images themselves, either from their computer or from any URL on the web.

The only problem which is related to this approach is that a new paying member usually does not see the difference between change icon and change photo links and starts with uploading the bigger picture only. However, the bigger one cannot be displayed until the smaller one is uploaded as well, so if this method is used, there is no visible result. A bad experience.

All right, the solution has been implemented a while ago. If a big picture is uploaded while the icon does not exist yet, the small image is created automatically by resizing the big one to the 40 x 50 size. And if the result is not as expected, the user can replace it by a better one later, of course.

By the way, one of our active players has made 11,331 moves 2 days ago (although we don't run any contest of this kind now), which simply proves that 1) people like to play, 2) BrainKing is fast and stable, 3) it is a new record of this year.

BrainKing sites transfer more than 1.2 TB a month, regarding all kind of data. It is a real progress, compared to 70 GB in January 2003.
BrainKing has more than 44,600 registered users at this moment. Unfortunately I have missed the 44,444th registration, it would be a great opportunity to create a special action. But never mind, we will prepare something much better for 55,555 event.
The Statistics page now displays your position on the Finished games and Best players subpages if you don't make it to the top 50 chart. It is a new feature of this day.
There are people who finished more than 16,000 rates games of one type (hyper backgammon). The graphs would need bigger sizes in these cases, I guess.
Yes, it is almost a midnight and too late to write something more meaningful.
Goodnight.