BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

I am glad that I haven't missed this day like I did with the 300th entry three months ago. Actually, 10th August is no holiday and means nothing but it was exactly 1 year ago - 10th August 2006 - when I had started to write this BrainKing blog and posted at least one article every day.

And since I don't think it would be necessary to continue with this approach (important events don't happen on a daily basis and who wants to read a garbage which is used to fill the holes in the calendar?), I am going to keep writing but not every day, it would be pointless. Which is also a good news to those who complained about appearing a new blog entry notification at the top of BrainKing's Main Page.

It is not unlikely that more article categories would be added to the blog but at this moment I don't want to make any promises.

Trojan.Spammer.HotLan is the name of trojan horse which has been using Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Gmail to create almost million fake e-mail accounts to send a spam everywhere in attempt to flood mail servers or any other bad reason. You might remember my article called How to fight a spam? which describes several kinds of an anti-spam protection and it seems that one of them (CAPTCHA) has been broken on the mentioned e-mail providers. And since millions of spam e-mails have been sent, BrainKing has been flooded as well and it resulted in a temporary overload. Luckily, we have found a new way how to fight it and everything is all right now.

I would like to add that if someone experiences a performance problem occasionally, it doesn't have to mean that BrainKing is responsible for that and no complaints on public discussion boards can solve it. There are always many many possible sources and it always take some time to check all of them unless you own a company of 100 full time employees and a server farm of 1000 machines to share the load. But I am sure that people who are not extremely naive understand this very well and it is not necessary to remind it over and over.

The recent events, mostly related to the site performance issues, have shown us that there is a way of misusing certain BrainKing features which cannot be tolerated anymore. Actually, it should have been done a long time ago anyway, but there are always many things to do and some of them are usually delayed. So be it.

All right, this is what it is about. Since there are still people who want to take advantage of a paid membership level without paying for it (which means that they usually let their subscriptions expire and continue playing thousands of games created before), this problem is going to be addressed seriously and with no further delays. This is the first of the new rules, added a while ago:

It is not possible to keep more than 50 game invitations by the same user at once. Moreover, if a paid membership level user creates game invitations and then his subscription expires without renewing, all game invitations created by him will be instantly deleted.

I believe that this rule will help to maintain the fair user policy for everyone on BrainKing, which is always one of our most important goals to achieve. More to come.

Just 6 months ago we posted a kind of descriptive article called Behind the scene about various processes which are required to maintain the BrainKing site and keep it up and running. Nowadays, the list could me made twice longer, at least. BrainKing has been evolving and although it contains much more features than before, it has also become a much more complicated and complex application.

I am not going to made a detailed analysis which would be quite boring for the majority of this blog readers. Shortly said, if someone is still experiencing performance issues regarding the BrainKing game site, just don't panic, please. And, as we posted 7 months ago, it's really not necessary to keep posting "something is strange and frustrating" kind of posts. There are many possibilities of performance improvements to focus on butm due to the quantity, everything takes its time. I am sure that at least other developers know what I mean. And everybody else, please be patient. Everything is under control, as usual.

There are features which I never thought of being useful or meaningful but I admit that I was wrong many times and what seems strange to me can be a great improvement to other people. The list of actions to choose when submitting a game move has just been extended by a new item which is called:

Move and go to the next game with a non-paying member

Yes, that's it and now I am convinced that players who prefer to make moves in games with pawns (non-paying BrainKing members) first can really find it as a nice simplification of their efforts. And since there are system-level developments tasks going on with a higher priority (related to performance etc.), it is the only improvement of the day.

I have just read that Amazon.com, my favorite online bookstore (I have been using it to purchase books since 1999), is going to release its own online payment system, to allow merchants to accept payments from their customer easily and securely, similar to PayPal or Google Checkout.

Read the full story here: Amazon.com to offer payment service

Well, that's a nice approach and not quite unexpected because big online companies like this one must extend their pool of service, in order to compete the competitors. The only thing that is worrying me is the high probability of this service being available to U.S. merchants only, which is exactly what happened to Google Checkout (actually, Google Checkout system can be used by United Kingdom merchants too but it is still not reachable for us) and it is the reason why the Google payment system is not supported on BrainKing.

I know that many people don't like PayPal for different reasons but I must admit that I am very glad that it exists because of its international and multilingual nature. Unless other big players accept the fact that the world does not end at the edges of American continent, we prefer PayPal as our main payment option.

I have just spent a few minutes searching the word "brainking" on Google (which is my favorite kind of relaxation when I want to use my computer but don't want to do anything meaningful), and after browsing through first 10 or 20 pages of results, I have noticed that BrainKing is included in one (or maybe more) site called "internet gambling directory".

That makes me think what the purpose of it really is. Shortly said, BrainKing is not a gambling site and we don't plan to make it a gambling site, it is not possible to play for real money on BrainKing and as long as we own the site, it will not be possible at all. However, there are sites which offer to play games for real money, and I mean games supported on BrainKing as well - backgammon, for example. And since some BrainKing pages could contain advertisements that promote gambling sites of this kind (and poker sites or online casinos), it might be good to put a little enlightenment to it.

All gambling related links which can be found on BrainKing sites belong to the category of paid advertisement and all of them link to external pages which are not associated with BrainKing at all. It is not possible to play for real money on our site. There is only one case which could be somehow close to this issue - tournaments with entry fees. But the fees can be applied in Brains only and it is just Brains what can be won as a prize - and Brains cannot be exchaged to real money, only spent on BrainKing for a membership etc.

A positive consequence of our presence in an internet gambling directory is that people who look for gambling sites can get to BrainKing by a mistake and maybe they will find out that playing just for fun is a good way how to spend a free time anyway.

As I have posted 4 months ago, there are statistical data which say that more than 90% of all e-mails is a spam. And since the most of modern e-mail clients use sophisticated anti-spam filters, spammers must be kind of inventive to make up new ways to overcome them and deliver their trash to poor readers. Funny thing is that I have recently received a spam which has been pretending to come from BrainKing itself, having a "From:" header set to info@brainking.com, which is our "system" address to notify users about new account approval etc.

Furthermore, the spammers has probably found out that sending their ridiculous offers at attached images is not very effective anymore, so their new tactics against anti-spam filters is to use pdf files instead. It may work because many people know this Adobe format as a totally harmless one and don't hesitate to open it.

I would like to highlight that BrainKing never sends any e-mails with attachements, especially not with images, pdf files or executable programs. Moreover, BrainKing never sends HTML e-mails, just plain text ones. It means that if you ever receive something like I have just described and the sender pretends to be from @brainking.com domain, it is a spam. If we decide to change our e-mail policy, it will be officially announced first, as any other important issue.

I have been asked to add a photographic smiley, so I have done it, along with several more ones:



And if I am not mistaken, this addition has filled up the 10th page of the popup smiley window, which means that no more smileys are planned to be added, unless we have a very good reason for that.

The bottom line - a security update for Thunderbird e-mail client has been released as well, and it is highly recommended to install it, if someone is using an older version.

As I was suggesting a week or two (or three) ago, the process of new team tournament creation would be much more straightforward, if it is maintained by one or more persons which can spend more time on it than I can.

So be it.

Since today, selected entrusted BrainKing users can access a new page to define team tournaments with all necessary parameters and options. It also means that requests of adding more tournaments, which are occasionally posted to the Tournaments discussion boards, have a bigger chance to be addressed. But since we already have 16 open team tournaments at this moment, I don't recommend to ask for new ones immediately.