BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

World of Warcraft day. Nothing else to say.

Actually, there have been two small events to mention:

• I guess that some people have been experiencing minor problems with the BrainKing site speed and accessibility today. After discovering that the main server was not restarted for more than 3 months (not the worst uptime), it has been given a boost and everything should be smooth now. And if it is not, it means that we are tuning some details right now.
• A new version of Firefox browser (2.0.0.6 - why so many zeros and subversions, anyway?) has been released and this update fixes several serious bugs and vulnerabilities, so it's recommended to install it as soon as possible. However, if the automatic update feature is not turned off (which is recommended as well), it should happen automatically.

You might have noticed the small "blogtopsites" icon at the right column of this blog site, more exactly at the Page Rank section. Well, it is not exactly a page rank, as Google defines this term, but it can work as an indicator of the blog popularity, compared to other blogs of the same category. And since we like statistics of any kind, it has been added and if I find more blog charts which are somehow interesting, I will be happy to add them as well.

By the way, I know it's not the hottest news of the day because it's been probably released some days ago, but Blizzard has finally found out that it is not too convenient to make people pay for an online game before trying it out (just imagine BrainKing with Brain Bishop as the lowest possible level), so they have finally created an option of 10-Day Free Trial of their famous MMORPG World of Warcraft. Of course, I have tried it out too. But if you intend to do the same, be prepared for a really long download - the installation files of the game client consume more than 3 GB and when I have successfully installed the game, it has started to download updates and patches of the total size of another 1 GB. Well, why not to spend a half a day to download a game? Or perhaps they are silently suggesting "go and buy the game on DVD instead".

Anyway, 10 days is still better than nothing.

I am glad that the recent article about the BrainKing's refund policy has been accepted as a descriptive and understandable one and there will be no more problems with that. Actually, there were no problems at all, except one or two cases in the past.

The article.

However, I have omitted a small detail which could cause a little misunderstanding, so let me post a short addition - no refunds can be applied for prize tournaments. It means that when someone creates a prize tournament, the prize (e.g. 1 year Brain Rook membership) must be provided before the tournament is started, which is the standard rule for BrainKing tournaments, in order to make sure that the winner would really receive it. And once the tournament is started, the prize (30 Euro in this case) cannot be returned to the tournament creator, not even within the 14 days period.

But I am sure that this entry is just about something what every prize tournament creator is already familiar with. Moreover, it is a nasty rainy weather here in Prague today.

One of neat features of this blog system (which I use occasionally but never write about it) is that it is possible to schedule new entries to dates and times in the future and make them appear at the pre-selected time. And since I have just spent a great week in Tunisia and had no time to connect to BrainKing from the hotel's reception, the recent 7 entries have helped to create an illusion that we are still here.

Speaking of traveling - if you ever decide to visit Prague and you are too addicted to BrainKing, there is an opportunity to use Liquid's personal WiFi hotspot, taking advantage of the FON worldwide network. The only assumption is that you must be situated near Liquid's home (click the previous link to see the map) and if you are not a FON registered member, you can use this hotspot to connect to BrainKing only. But it's still a good thing to know.

During the first years of BrainKing's existence we had been facing small problems with accepting payments from foreign users who had wanted to become paying members ("foreign" means "outside Czech Republic" ) because the major payment gateways had not supported our country. That's why the representatives had been established on a voluntary basis - cheerful and willing enthusiasts had been working as proxies for their local community, collecting money from them and sending it to us.

This is, fortunately, the past.

Although the representatives did a great piece of work and helped us a lot, I am glad that I don't need to bother anyone with it anymore, which is also the answer to the question "what happened to the representatives and will you list them again?". The answer is no because BrainKing currently supports five different payment methods, including the most popular PayPal or MoneyBookers. The only official way to pay for anything on BrainKing is through our shopping cart system and we take no responsibility for any other options. If new payment channels are added, they will be officially announced first.

Yep, one more note to the multilingualism and related issues. As you probably know, the former name of our site was BrainKing.com because we hadn't planned any language or domain expansions in October 2002 and it had been quite popular to give web-based companies the .com suffix to their names.

The contemporary situation is different, of course, and the official name of the site is BrainKing and nothing more. However, the older title was used in many localized texts before and it is not an easy job to pinpoint all such occurences and fix them (the SQL gurus can suggest a find-and-replace string function but the problem is not related to the English texts only - some languages use inflections of nouns or even more horrible grammatical rules).

Please, if you find a "BrainKing.com" text anywhere on the BrainKing site (except the BrainKing.com discussion board name which has another reason for it), send me a note. The past must be buried.

From time to time I receive a message from a paying member on BrainKing who has just decided to stop playing games on our site and since his membership subscription has not expired yet, he asks for a partial (or even full) refund. Although such cases are more rare than regular, we created our own refund policy and published it on the Paid Membership page some months ago. However, since it could be left unnoticed, let me post it again here:

14-DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. If you have decided that the purchased level of membership is not what you have really wanted, you have the right to ask for a full refund during the first 14 days of your subscription. Since BrainKing's higher membership levels contain many features and services which cannot be canceled or returned after they are used, the refund claim is valid only if it is clearly evident that you have not taken advantage of any features or services which are specific for the corresponding membership level.

Why these restrictions? The reason is simple and obvious - BrainKing is not selling any goods which could be returned because, for example, where you become a Brain Rook, create 50 tournaments, start 400 games and open 2 fellowships, it would be very distasteful to other users to delete all these tournaments, games and fellowships, in order to cancel the previously used benefits of the higher membership level. I still think that the policy is fair enough and there is no need to change it.

Today's entry is a direct sequel of the previous one because it has something to do with the multilinguality of BrainKing. To be more specific, with the evolving multilinguality.

The site is not static and new texts to translate are being added almost every day (or, at least, every week). It can be kind of nerve-straining, especially when we add new games with long rules, which are the most complicated aspects of the BrainKing translation process. Luckily, the majority of translators are handling these situations perfectly and the most localizations are still up to date. The problem emerges when a translator suddenly stops logging to BrainKing and silently disappears. Then, the number of non-translated texts starts to grow and after several months it does not look nice when some pages are only partially translated and the rest is displayed in English. For instance, it happened to the Romanian version of BrainKing.

If you are using a non-English and non-Czech translation of BrainKing and you can observe that the localization has not been updated for a long time, and you would like to contribute to the localization process, please don't hesitate to contact us. Any help is always appreciated.

I know that this entry is a little paradox in its very inside because it is targeted to non-English speaking BrainKing community but the blog is in English only (which is another issue to be addressed later anyway). On the other hand, it will be a good reference for me in the future.

BrainKing is actively used by players from many countries and a significant part of them does not speak English. Which is not a problem at all (and it is the reason why BrainKing is translated to so many languages) and we are glad to be open to a big number of nationalities, but it becomes a problem when someone discovers a bug and wants to file it to the Bug Tracker - unfortunately in Estonian, Chinese, Norwegian or any other language I don't understand.

The current solution is to ask people to use the particular localized discussion board instead (BrainKing.ee, BrainKing.cn, BrainKing.no etc.) and ask a person who speaks English and reads the same board to post the translated report to the Bug Tracker, if the issue is identified as a real bug (otherwise it can be easily resolved in the mentioned discussion board without any language barriers). The future solution could be more sophisticated (a wizard system to describe a bug by many localized options to choose from) but it is just in a stage of consideration. And maybe when we really finish and release something like that, there will be no bugs on BrainKing at all.

Everybody needs to search something and I belong to people who need to search every day, which is the reason why I occasionally search for neat tools/extensions to make the search process easier and more pleasant. The newest add-on I am currently playing with is called Hyperwords.

Hyperwords has everything what I really like on tools - it is simple but powerful and does not bother you with long and repulsive toolbars or finger-twisting keyboard shortcuts (by the way, any ideas which keyboard shortcuts we should add to BrainKing? ). You just select a text (one or more words) and a context menu instantly appears, where you can choose from many useful functions - for example, search the words on Google, find references on Wikipedia, get locations on Google Maps, translate, convert, shop, blog, e-mail, print, etc. I am satisfied with this add-on so much that I have even uninstalled my previous favorite Web Search Pro because I don't need it anymore.

Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1941 And the tool is pretty customizable as well. Great work.

The smileys are, whether we like it or not, an important part of BrainKing, because we can see them almost everywhere on the site (including the recent additions of smileys in fellowship names) and I am sure that many people cannot imagine BrainKing without smileys now. Moreover, I know of several BrainKing users who became paying members mostly because of the ability to use smileys.

Since the smileys system can be customized in many ways, it might be a little confusing for new users who are not familiar with all features it provides and usually don't know what to set/change and where. The current status of the Settings pages (regarding the smileys options) is:

• Settings / General contains the Show smileys switch which is kind of hidden at the bottom part of the page and many new paying members are not aware of it at all. Which is usually the reason why they see the number codes instead of smileys and don't know how to turn them on.


• Settings / JavaScript is the home of all other smileys options, a user can set if the smileys popup window appears when a mouse cursor is hovered or clicked, which selected smileys would appear to choose from, etc. And since all these functions require JavaScript to work, they were put to this category.

Shortly said, the first sub-page includes the "read" settings (whether you would see the posted smileys or not) and the second one is designed for the "write" settings - functions related to the posting process.

The question is, would be better to create a special Settings / Smileys page just for smileys? I think it would solve many current problems and since we might add more smileys options in the future, there would be enough space to put them to.

The word "smileys" has been used 15 times in this article, including the title and this last sentence.

I hope that nobody would expect us to make BrainKing a join stock company and sell it out. We don't plan anything like that, I am pretty happy to keep the full control and make sure that all parts of BrainKing are handled properly.

Actually, I have just found a site where you can play a broker game, even with fictitious BrainKing shares and buy them or sell them etc. Although I have no idea why the price is set to 14 USD and haven't explored the game details yet, it might be interesting to see how it evolves. Or maybe not but I have just wanted to drop a note about it.

http://www.urladex.com/index.py?page=url&url=brainking

Anyway, it is nice that the page contains an up-to-date screenshot of BrainKing home page, even with the flying dragon. But I think you must be a registered user to see it.

The Week of Sorting Options contains a new addition which has been requested yesterday (yes, some suggestions can be implemented really quickly). The list of finished games at the Profile / Finished games page is sortable by all columns, so it is now, for instance, very easy to find out the best ratings of the selected player.

And since there are fellowships which have been containing smiley codes in their names for many years, I have decided to make them visible at last (and several people has already detected this change and improved their fellowship names as well ). The smiley-enhanced fellowship names should be displayed on all related pages, including team tournaments, fellowship tournaments/ponds/stairs etc. Such smileys are always resized to the height of 12 pixels, otherwise they could make the links too distorted.

Who likes to customize BrainKing pages (those which can be customized), can start to play with two new sorting options:

• Ratings page - the list of games and top rated players can be sorted by all available columns. If you, for example, want to know the absolutely highest BKR value, sort the table by Best BKR column and descending (green arrow points down).


• Team matches at the fellowship main pages. Since the growing number of team matches among fellowships makes the match lists not too well arranged, the tables of running and finished matches can be sorted by any column as well. Furthermore, the table of finished matches highlights the ones which were won by the selected fellowship.

BrainKing contains many tables and we don't want to make all of them sortable but if there are some important ones where the sorting would be a significant improvement, I'll be glad to consider it.

The recent launch of new team tournaments has started a hunt for quality players to make the teams. And since the number of tournaments is 16 at this moment and it is likely that even more team tournaments will be created this year, it might be a little cumbersome to inform the team captains about the last events, if you are a Big Boss and want to make sure that all teams will be ready before the deadline.

The new small improvement can be found at the main page of your fellowship. If you are the Big Boss and there is at least one team captain available, the link Send a message to all fellowship captains will appear below the list of all teams. Clicking this link would invoke a page where the actual message can be written and send. And, of course, each captain receives only one copy of the message, even if he is a captain of more teams of the selected fellowship.