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.

According to the BrainKing statistics page, the popularity of our newest game is growing and it is currently occupying the 17th position (out of 103) at the started games chart. Very well. I am glad to see that even the simple games can be widely accepted by the player community, or maybe that's the reason why so many people play them, because their rules are very easy to adopt and learn. Which makes me think, would it be a good idea to add more variants of the Mancala family of games? From a programmer's point of view, it would be a relatively easy task to do, because a modification of an existing game model is always more convenient than a creation of the completely new game. On the other hand, do we really need more games to add?

Heh, today's entry is full of questions. But I will probably answer them myself soon.

You might have noticed certain changes in the advertisements on BrainKing sites, some kinds of banners have been removed and new ways of ads (simple text links, mostly) have appeared. This is a result of our experiments, investigations and, in a few cases, specific contracts with several companies. I am aware of complaints from several users about certain too aggressive banners which, if nothing else, cause a bad overall experience of a new user who visits the site. If nothing goes wrong, all banners which are not under our full control should be removed from the site completely later this year.

However, if you are a paying member, nothing mentioned in the previous paragraph should be affecting you. And if you are not, there is still a chance to catch a bonus color code in April.

My first intention was to do something extremely important on BrainKing today but instead of that I have been installing Windows Vista and trying to make it communicate with my wireless printer. An excellent way to spend a pleasant afternoon. But I don't want to blame Microsoft for everything - at least now it works great and the Vista interface is - uh, well, it's not worse than the XP one. I think I'll get used to it soon and we need to test our products on all possible platforms, including the most recent one.

Which means that if you decide to use Windows Vista on your computer and BrainKing starts to behave strangely with them, feel free to post the problem to our Bug Tracker. I should be able to do something, at least to investigate on the same environment.

By the way, there is also a small improvement of the Dice Poker games - since it can be kind of tricky to hit the small checkboxes when you want to mark the dice to re-roll, now it is possible to click the dice images instead, to get the same effect. This feature expects that you didn't disable JavaScript in your browser, of course.

Every site which supports some kind of a public discussion system becomes a target of spam posts, sooner or later (certain statistical data say that more than 90% of all e-mails is a spam). BrainKing is not an exception and if you were with us 4 years ago, you might remember the spam attacks which caused a temporary suppression of automatic new account creating process. Now we have much better controlled system of a fake account generation and although it's still not perfect (what is perfect?), BrainKing can be called a "safe site", regarding the public discussion boards content. There are many different ways to avoid different kinds of spam but all of them have their negative aspects. Based on my observations, I have made the following conclusions:

• Only registered users can post - this method prevents anonymous spamming which can filter out the easiest spam robots (not too effective). Since the user registration process does not require to enter any important or private data, more sophisticated robots usually pass this point.


• IP address check - it can block the attacker's IP address and add it to a black list. It means that if a new post request comes from an IP which is found in the black list, it is automatically rejected. However, since many computers can share the same IP address (e.g. all employees in one company which connects through a proxy server), such method could easily cut off innocent people as well.


• CAPTCHA verification - CAPTCHA is widely used on many sites around the world and its main function is to generate an image containing a set of numbers/letters which must be written to a text field by the user to validate the form. The advantage is obvious - since the letters are usually distorted in many ways, robots should not be able to "read" them and pass this checking point. Unfortunately, modern spam robots already use an OCR algorithm and a CAPTCHA is no longer an obstacle for them. I have even seen a Firefox extension which is able to read the CAPTCHA image generated on eBay pages. Furthermore, blind people would not be allowed to register on CAPTCHA protected sites until an audio alternative is added to the form as well. BrainKing does not plan to use this solution, it is not worth the effort.


• Asirra verification - Asirra is a Microsoft product which generates one or more images and asks the user to identify them. For example, on this page you are given a set of animal photos with the request to identify all cats. This is what the robots are unable to solve, as long as there is no artificial intelligence adopted by them. But - the Microsoft solution works only if JavaScript is enabled in the user's browser (which is not always a true) and, regarding the server side, it does not support all programming languages, ergo the programmer would need to create his own implementation based on this idea. And how can a blind user recognize a computer generated image?


• Logic and mathematics - this is an interesting proposal but easily could drive some people crazy. The server generates an image which contains a simple task, e.g. "5 + 3 = " and the user is supposed to write "8" to the text field. Yes, it is very easy but when the robots start to solve the simple questions of this kind, the server will be forced to create more complicated tasks and there are not many people who would be happy to use a calculator every time they want to register an account or post to a board. Logical questions ("what color is a grass?") should be a more difficult block to crack by a robot but something like that can work on English site only - I really don't plan to create stupid questions in all 19 supported languages on BrainKing and update them each time when a new localization is added.

Well, if there is someone who does not understand why all new BrainKing registrations must be manually approved before they can be used, I hope the answer is more than descriptive. And, of course, I'll be glad for all comments (on this site, please).

Let me be very short tonight - a new game has been released, it is called Mancala and this time I have launched it with the game rules as well (immediately). It was necessary because the game of Mancala does not exist in fact - actually, it is the name of the group of games which follow the similar pattern - but nobody wants to make this things complicated on BrainKing (if you are interested, you can find more information here). I hope you will find this latest addition to the pool of BrainKing games interesting and playable.

By the way, when I write this post, there are less than 2 hours to get the last chance of the red code bonus.

The question of the day is - does it make sense to purchase a membership and get only the membership? We have bonus color codes, we have Christmas Special actions, we have Easter Eggs, we have a special action every month and when one misses the opportunity, a new action will take place soon. So why would someone pay for just a "normal product"?

And the answer is - of course it makes sense and BrainKing is not a charity, so it wouldn't be wise to think that such special offers will be here forever. We can call theme "promo actions" and they have its purpose and importance. What I want to highlight is that when we say that an action will not be offered again in the future, that's what we really mean and who wants to catch the chance, should not postpone it for a better time.

For example, take the popular red code action. People like it and many of them have already turned it to their profit, but the other ones should read carefully now:

The last Red Code bonus will be offered tomorrow, on 17th April 2007, and it will never appear again. If you want the 100% bonus and see a light bulb next to the Paid Membership link, don't hesitate this time. There will be no exceptions.

The other bonus codes will remain to the end of April.