BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Since I have received several complaints from our Russian users who reported that brainking.ru domain stopped working, we have checked our domain records and settings and - voilà! - there was a typo in the mapped IP address, causing the domain to point to a non-existing machine (most likely a side effect of the server moving event). It is fixed now and all our domains should be accessible with no problems.

The timeouts for games are disabled now and the timeout check process is to be restarted later today. However, the real time is not stopped, which means that this situation does not solve the problem of Fischer's Clock time control games. In order to make the conditions fair to everyone after the recent weekend downtime, I have reset the current timeout data to their original values, based on the particular game time control settings. In the future, it will be a part of the standard process of time restoration, in case of longer site downtimes (which, as I hope, would not happen too often ).

We are pleased to say that no catastrophic scenario is to be realized and everything is back to normal. I am talking about the recent BrainKing inactivity during the whole weekend (and a little more) which was caused by a damaged surface of database server disks. Instead of using backup files (which would mean to lose the most recent data forever), we have decided to contact a company which specializes on hard disk restoration and although the rescue process has taken more than 3 days and has not been the cheapest one, the final result is that no data is lost and the server itself has been improved by another backup solution, as an addition to the existing ones.

Very well. Since no serious harm has been caused, so special action will be taken. Well, almost. Like every year, we plan to launch a Christmas Action and, with respect to the user satisfaction, it should be much better than the previous one (A quick lookup at the blog archives ... yes, definitely. Who wants just one free month?). An official announcement will be posted at BrainKing News section and as a blog entry as well.

The article title gives a hint about something new for fellowships too. Of course. Several weeks ago, one or two active users reported an undocumented option of creating a team to play matches with randomly selected games. That time, it was a bug, most likely a side effect of another improvement. This time, it is a feature. If you are a Big Boss of your fellowship, you can:

• Add a random game team.
• Create an internal random tournament.
• Create internal random stairs.
• Invite another fellowship to a random team match.

By the way, this article proves that even big companies like Google have problems with their data storages.