BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

A new game has been added to BrainKing game site, increasing the total number of supported game types to 105. It is called Frog Legs and, as the name suggests, it has something to do with frogs.

Actually, this game is very similar to Frog Finder, another popular board game created by Michael Coan in 2006, and most of the rules are identical. Let's highlight important differences:

• There are no red and blue frogs which would belong to the players. Instead, the game board always contains randomly positioned 9 green frogs which are invisible to both players. The object is to get more points than the opponent, gained by shooting and guessing until all 9 frogs are revealed.


• The board size is 13x13 and always starts with 0 (a zero) in the very center of it. The purpose of this change is to avoid losing points at the first move when a shot is made with no information about the frog locations. It also means that the frogs are randomly placed at the board, except the central square G7 and all its surrounding squares.


• Since the game ends when all 9 frogs are found (or shot), no further points are added/subtracted at the end because there are no frogs left to calculate.

After fixing one or two bugs which have been caught shortly after the release, the game is now stable, balanced and seems to be quite popular. Very well. And they are tasty as well.

I have spotted this message a while ago and although it probably foretells a new wave of global spam attacks (which is not a positive thing), it has made me a little bit pleased that we never tried to pass the process of new BrainKing account verification to computers. As you might remember, I published a kind of comprehensive article about different methods of fake account filtering and came to a conclusion that no 100% invulnerable protection existed. And we were not wrong. Click and read on:

Yahoo! CAPTCHA cracked

Just as the Hacker Webzine article says, even this new algorithm is not unmistakable and it successfully cracks the Yahoo code in 35% cases. However, considering the fact that a robot can make more than 100,000 tries per day (or even more), it would be capable of creating about 35,000 fake accounts on a daily basis and quickly turn them to instant spam generators before the site staff is aware of that and disables them.

All right, what about BrainKing? There is no reason to panic because no robots can break a human factor (until everything is controlled by The Matrix) and since we strongly support the meaning of a manual verification, any number of attempts of this kind can be easily deleted and blocked by one mouse click.

It happened almost a year ago when the Notepad system had been improved by the option of adding and editing more folders to store personal notes.

And now it is been done for your BrainKing Message Box as well.

Simply visit the Message box page, click change next to the Trash link and create a folder (or more folders) of your taste. Then you can start to archive messages to your own folders, move messages among folders etc.

And, of course, nobody is allowed to add an unlimited number of folders, some restrictions are applied but who is not inclining to megalomaniac thoughts, should be happy anyway.

Although this incoming event was announced at least twice at this blog site and once at BrainKing's server news, we would like to post the final reminder for everyone who is not aware of that yet, because there are still several days left.

As of 1st February 2008, a 19% VAT will be added to all membership prices, which makes them a little more expensive (for instance, 1 year Brain Rook price will be changed to 36 Euro, 1 year Brain Knight level to 24 Euro etc.). There is still a chance to get a membership for current rates, to the end of January 2008.

There is one more change to the BrainKing's shopping cart system - the PayPay option has been removed from the list of supported payment methods. The reason is that:

• Many people chose it by a mistake because the name was very similar to PayPal and then it meant more work for us to fix such orders manually.
• Except two or three cases, nobody ever used it, so there is no point to keep it, according to the previous point.

Speaking of payment options, it seems that a new player called Noca has recently emerged and if everything what they promise turns out to be a truth, it could mean an important competition to PayPal and other global payment systems. But since Noca is still in a beta status, it is too early to make any conclusions.

BrainKing's implementation of the autopass feature for gammon type games works as "opt in", which means that when a new gammon game is started, the autopass is enabled only if both players agree with that (although there were many passionate discussions about this topic, I still keep my opinion that everybody should be given a choice - not everyone wants BrainKing to make the pass moves automatically, even if there is no other valid move to perform). No matter how controversial this approach can appear, it is a good compromise.

By the way, Wikipedia does not have an entry describing the autopass feature, does it mean that nobody ever though it was worth writing an article? Heh. Just kidding. But it might be good to add it. Anybody can do that.

Very well. There is a new feature which has something to do with autopasses and it seems that some people could like it - when a new tournament is being created, the following option appears - All games of this tournament are generated with enabled autopass feature (in game types where the autopass can be used). What is it about? Currently, when a gammon tournament is generated and started, BrainKing checks the Settings / Game filter / Select games which you want to play with the auto pass feature options of the particular pair of players (for a given game being created) and enables the autopass only if both players have this option enabled as well, for the corresponding game type. A drawback of this solution is obvious - you can never know which games of this tournament will be started with enabled or disabled autopass. This new option guarantees that all games of the tournament will be started with enabled autopass, regardless personal settings of the participants.

It is quite easy to distinguish such tournaments - they are marked with a red dot at the tournament list.

Primo: Although the Map of visitors at the right column of this blog site is currently showing much less dots than before, it does not mean that nobody visits BrainKing.info pages anymore. In order to keep the view up-to-date and not too overpopulated, ClusterMaps resets the site access data once a year, to provide a fresh information. If someone is interested in the archive data, just click the map and follow the instructions.

Secundo: I have noticed that the list of Today's top visited boards at the Discussion boards page did not show smileys in board names. It is fixed now.

Tertio: If you open a Stairs page for a game where an autopass can be used, the players using the autopass feature by default (at their Settings / Game filter page) are prefixed by a red dot. It can be an useful feature for those who prefer to play only with opponents who do not disable the autopass in the particular gammon game type.

Actually, this short article is posted by a robot, I am currently on my way to Casino Royale.

Cheversi is one of interesting and original games which are currently implemented at BrainKing game site only (or at least that's what I think, regarding the Google search results. Being a quite modern game, many good players found out that it's not well balanced and the black player wins the majority of games, which is confirmed by BrainKing statistics as well.

After months of tests and discussion, the time has come to make an important change and modify the rules to make the game balanced with equal changes for both players. Since such a significant change cannot be done instantly, I have decided to release it on 1st February 2008, 00:00:01 GMT+01:00, so everybody who plays Cheversi would have enough time to prepare for that. And, of course, all games which are started prior to 1st February will be finished with the current rules.

Now, I would like to publish the upcoming modification of the rules, just to make sure that I have not omitted anything and the authors of this proposal can check it:

1. White starts with a King anywhere on the board.
2. Black responds with any piece with the exception of a King. Black piece HAS to touch White piece either diagonally, horizontally or vertically .The game continues in this manner when pieces are touching either color pieces and can never be separate from other pieces. Black King has to be played as a last piece in the game.
3. Bishops have to take alternative colors, like in chess.
4. Players can CALL for opponent's Queen anytime during the game which simply works like this: If a player A puts his Queen on the board, the opponent B has to play his Queen immediately after this move by A. For Black, unless the Queen wasn't CALLED earlier, the 7th move is mandatory to play a Queen. (remember, the 8th Black move has to be a King, so a Queen cannot be played beyond the 7th move)
5. Black King finishes the game and must touch the last placed White piece put on the board. It also means that the last White move cannot be done the way that Black King cannot touch it in the last move.

This set of rules eliminates greatly, if not completely, the power of 8th move by the Black, and eliminates the intention to wait until the last move with the Queens.

And everything will be announced as "in-game server news" soon as well.

The number of BrainKing discussion boards is not small and it is not easy to keep a good overview of all of them, especially when a user posts something and forgets to check the particular board for responses. There is a "favorite boards" section at the right column of BrainKing game site pages but although it shows the current numbers of new messages (in a red font), important replies can be quickly buried if the board is too frequently used by other contributors.

A new feature, which could solve this problem, has been requested several hours ago and quickly implemented, so everyone can take advantage of it now. There is a new option at the Settings page, called Notify me if someone replies to my discussion board posts. If you set it on and, as it says, someone writes a response to your post, BrainKing will send you a notification to your message box. The notification contains a link to the corresponding discussion board, the name of the reply author and even the reply text itself. Of course, if you want to follow up with the topic, you will not reply to the notification but simply click one of the provided links, locate the post and do the usual.

Of course, this feature works only when a "real" reply is posted - it means that the user who replies to your post must do it using the "Reply" button or the "box" link, otherwise the system cannot recognize the original post. BrainKing is smart but not that smart yet.

"The average person in the US watches about four hours of television each day. Over the course of a year, we see roughly twenty five thousand commercials, many of them produced by the world's highest-paid cognitive psychologists. And these heavily produced advertisements are not merely for products, but for a lifestyle based on a consumer mind-set. What they're doing, day in and day out, twenty-five thousand times a year, is hypnotizing us into seeing ourselves as consumers who want to be entertained rather than as citizens who want to be informed and engaged. We need to take back the airwaves as a sphere of mature conversation and dialogue about our common future."

Duane Elgin, "On Simplicity and Humanity's Future, IONS, Noetic Sciences Review, December 2002

I like to get an overview of our site statistics, so I have recently inspected January 2008 numbers, generated by BrainKing site. Generally said, the results are as we have expected, the numbers of unique visitors and page views are successfully growing, etc. There is another number which is worth noticing - 33.6% BrainKing site visitors are still using Internet Explorer 6.0. It is alarming.

Last year I wrote a short article about Internet Explorer flaws and why we do no recommend to use it. It is understandable that there are situations where people have no other choice (e.g. their employer does not allow to install any alternative browsers to company computers), but there is no point to keep the old, obsolete, terrible and dangerous 6.0 version.

If you are using Internet Explorer now, please do not click here. Most likely, your browser will crash or, if you are lucky, freeze for a long time.

Still not convinced? How about this?

Some of the known vulnerabilities and security risks can be fixed by applying a patch but since we know that many people do not update their operating system on a regular basis, it cannot be taken as an excuse. It is really sad how many people want to stay at
the weird and wonderful world of Internet Explorer.

And now something different - for a long time, I have been wondering why the User agent (a short text string containing your web browser name, version, operating system etc.) which is detected by BrainKing on some users' accounts contains mysterious words FunWebProducts. Now I know that and it is really not funny, especially where there are people (not all of them, of course) who complain about BrainKing speed and swear that their computer is not infected by any viruses, spyware or adware, but the user agent proves the opposite. And it is not about 1 or 2 persons - the database says that more than 1000 BrainKing users have their computers infected with this bad product. And no matter whether the particular unwanted product is harmful or not, it always means a risk of a speed issue.

I have noticed an interesting Firefox Add-on today and I find it very useful for English speaking BrainKing users who like to communicate with players from other countries or need a quick translation of a foreign language word which appears at a discussion board etc. What I really like about this extension is its simplicity - the only thing you have to do is to choose the target language (it is set to English by default) and select the word to translate with your mouse (a double click works too). A small pop-up window instantly appears, containing the translation, the Wikipedia lookup and some more useful information about the word. And who does not like pop-up windows, can switch to Quick mode which makes the translation appear at your browser's address bar (where the current page URL usually resides).

I have just tested this functionality with French, Italian and even Czech words. It works very good. Of course, it is not capable of translating everything but can work as a great reference tool in many cases.

Mozilla page of this add-on and the official home page.

It is interesting to observe how the spam generators and robots but evolve along with smarter and smarter junk mail filters which are, at the present time, integrated in all important e-mail clients. After attempts of sending tons of image spams, PDF spams, "you are the winner" or "your bank account has been suspended" hoaxes, a new trend to fool trustful or inexperienced people has recently emerged - these e-mails are, unlike typical spams, very short and usually contain only several words, for instance "Come Relax with Me", "Your Love Has Opened", "I Love You Soo Much" etc., followed by a link to an unmeaning IP address, something like "http://234.543.34.765" (this one is deliberately wrong).

Of course, it is not recommended to click on anything like that. This kind of spam can be particularly dangerous for these reasons:

• The Valentine's Day is coming (in a few weeks), so this "campaign" is obviously targeted to lonely hearts who are more willing to respond.
• It does not look like a typical spam and many anti-spam programs might not filter it out.
• There is no suspiciously looking link like "click here to claim your prize!" or "visit this page to unblock your bank account".
• It's been reported that certain kind of these e-mails contain a new mutation of the Nuwar worm which can be very harmful.

Very well, BrainKing is not an antivirus company, so why am I writing this? I would like to remind that we always recommend to access our site using the BrainKing domain, i.e. http://BrainKing.com (or its national versions) instead of http://89.187.130.22, unless there is no other way how to connect. Especially now, where we are experimenting with cluster-based solutions, using a direct IP address might cause unexpected results. And, although the exhaustion year of IPv4 addresses is currently estimated to 2010, this kind of addresses is going to be a history anyway.

This is neither about a Hong Kong film of the same name, nor a popular internet service, the point of this article results from the recent improvement of BrainKing's bug tracking feature. Since the Report a bug at this page is available at all BrainKing pages now, it obviously helped many people to find out that there is something like a bug tracker (which is good) and when something is working "strange", it must be reported immediately, without thinking about it first or trying to find a solution (which is bad). Ergo, I have decided to publish a list of events/topics/behaviors/issues which should never be posted to the Bug Tracker:

• Pages are loading slowly - it is never a bug to report. Please find the solution here.
• Some images are not displayed - ditto, please refer to this article.
• My opponents are not moving - as long as the defined time control allows it, nobody is obliged to make game moves faster. Who does not like to wait too many days, should accept invitations with a shorter time control.
• The dice are not fair - some clarification of this very popular myth can be found here.
• I have finished a game but my rating chart position has not changed - please read the Position Task paragraph of this entry.
• Advertisements are annoying - it is usually reported by non-paying members who think that advertisements which are included in certain BrainKing pages are too obtrusive. The solution is easy - you can either upgrade to a paid membership level and get a right to disable all advertisements (new options will appear at the Settings page) or stick with a free membership and get used to it.
• My opponent should timeout but 24 hours has been added to his time instead - your opponent is probably using the automatic vacation feature. Please find more information at BrainKing's FAQ page.
• Smiley window does not appear - either this feature is disabled at your Settings / JavaScript page or your browser does not allow to run JavaScripts at BrainKing site. Please check both Settings page and a security panel at your browser's options.

Yes, I know that it might be better to include this list to the Bug Tracker page itself, mostly because the majority of BrainKing users do not speak English, but I want to wait until I am sure it contains all important information before it is passed to the translators. Meanwhile, a link to this article will be added to proper BrainKing pages instead.

One more note - since today, when a new bug is reported, BrainKing stores the reporter's user agent value and the language version of BrainKing he is currently using. The reason is that we can easily retrieve this important information from the bug database instead of asking the user afterwards.

BrainKing is, as the previous entry implies, a complex site and since it contains really many features and new features are added very often, it will never be 100% bug-free. It is absolutely normal, of course, and this article is not meant to philosophize about an ideal world with no bugs at all. Bugs should be reported, tracked and resolved, which is exactly what the Bug Tracker is created for. The point is that not everyone knows how to make a good a descriptive bug report, especially when the particular user does not speak English or Czech, because the more information we get, the better is the change that the bug can be recognized, reproduced and fixed.

The improvement of this day is kind of easy and discreet, however it can be found at the top of every page. More precisely, at the right side of the center section, next to the left side of the right column ... oh well, just find the ant smiley with a tooltip Report a bug at this page. When it is clicked, a New bug form is opened and the bug reporting process continues just like we are used to, except one small detail - URL of the page where the ant icon has been clicked is assigned to the bug report as a very important information, which is usually missing at the report descriptions. And since BrainKing is running on many domains and language versions, the URL is stored at the universal format - instead of, for instance, "http://brainking.com/en/Board?bc=1", it shows only "Board?bc=1".

The bug icon is contained in its own section, regarding CSS styles, so if you don't want to use it at your own style, simply find the "bug-me-panel" element and disable it. For design related reasons, this section is disabled for WebTV style by default, but it can be solved later.

First of all, I would like to apologize to technically educated people who will probably find this article boring because it contains nothing new, regarding the common behavior of computers, networks and the web. Hints and suggestions, which are presented here, are mostly targeted to BrainKing users who are occasionally confused why the site is slower than usual and do not know what to do with it.

Very well. Let me go through all known problems and their solutions:

• My connection to BrainKing is slow and my friend says that it is fast for him. Yes, this complaint belongs to the frequent ones and although it is not very descriptive, there are always something to say. In the first place, we already summarized some information in the past and since all of those tips are still valid, I don't want to post them again - simply click this link and read on. However, it never hurts to recapitulate some fundamental knowledge to base the rest on. A web application of the BrainKing type is a very complex and large-scale system that works on a centralized principle, which means that every user who wants to play games or do any other interaction with other players, must use a client software (which is, in this case, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or any other supported web browser) to connect to the BrainKing server, send requests and get responses. It is a direct opposite to a peer-to-peer application where clients can communicate one another, without routing all information and data through a centralized server (Skype or ICQ are good examples). It also means that no BrainKing user is actually "connected" to the server - when he clicks a link or submit a game move, the browser connects to the server, receives a generated web page and disconnects. Unlike online applications where a client creates a long-standing connection and uses is to communicate with a server continuously, a browser based client discards a connection once it is used and must always create a new one. Ergo, if one BrainKing page is loaded very fast, nothing can guarantee that the next one will keep the same response time.
  
  Solution:
  • If a BrainKing pages partially loads and then the browser seems freezed or doing nothing to display the rest, do not wait passively and click the browser's Reload button. In 99% cases, the page data has been lost somewhere on the way and it is almost always faster to get everything again.
  • If reload does not help, try to click the browser's Stop button (which should immediately stop the page loading process), wait for a couple of second and hit Reload again. It is well known that some web browsers can start to act strange under certain circumstances if web pages are being loaded too frequently for a long time - it can help to give them some time to make a garbage collection, so to say.
  • If stop and reload does not help, restart the whole browser and try to open BrainKing again. An occasional restart is a good thing even for BrainKing itself and many programs work better if they are freshly loaded to the computer's memory.
  • Still does not work? Check your computer for a possible presence of spyware or viruses. This action is recommended to be done on a regular basis anyway, especially on computers which are frequently connected to the internet. Furthermore, check if you are using the latest versions of important applications which are installed at your computer (it includes the operating system which is Microsoft Windows in many cases - check the Windows Update service at least once a week). There is an interesting report which says that only 5% of all tested computers contains up-to-date software and more than 40% computers contain at least 11 out-of-date programs which can cause a security risk. Never underestimate this.
  • Is it still slow? Please read the Network side section of this article and try to apply listed tips. It is likely that the problem has emerged somewhere between your computer and BrainKing server and it always means that neither you nor we can solve it ourselves - a third party must be involved as well. Sad, but true.
  • You can also try to activate a new option called Use the "lightweight" version of BrainKing which can be found at BrainKing's Settings / General page. It can be helpful for people who experience page loading speed problems and mostly want to play games, even if other BrainKing features would be reduced or disabled. The trick is that when this option is on, BrainKing will shorten the length of its most important pages to the least possible minimum, disable all JavaScript features and ignore some values which are real-time calculated.
  • Nothing helps and you are really desperate and hopeless? All right, this is the time to contact us - the e-mail address is info@brainking.com, we understand English and Czech, and the more information you provide (your BrainKing ID or user name, your operating system, browser type, screen size, connection speed - guaranteed by your ISP, name of your ISP - internet service provider, your country etc.), the better is the chance that we find out the problem source which can be really specific only for you, and suggest a specific solution. Once again, please be descriptive and give us as many information as possible. Messages like "it doesn't work, help!" or "all other sites are fast but BrainKing is slow, fix it" are usually sent directly to the trash folder. Important! Do not use BrainKing public discussion boards for this purpose. Such messages are usually buried under other user responses like "it does not happen to me, BrainKing is fast" or "yes, it happens to me too but it was better yesterday" and rarely turn out a positive result.


• BrainKing works fine but I have problems with images - they are loaded very slowly and some of them never show up. Ah, the complexity comes to a focus again. BrainKing images are served by a separate server which is running at i.brainking.com address ("i" stands for "images"), in order to balance the total load and give the BrainKing application more computing power to handle game related requests - calculate game positions, resolve various game situations, search through discussion boards etc. And the possible problem source can be that your browser does not want to handle these images correctly because they come from a different server (not "brainking.com"), especially when you use a localized BrainKing domain (brainking.de, brainking.es, ...).
  
  Solution:
  • Make sure that your local DNS cache is up to date. Sometimes, when a new domain or subdomain is created, there can be a delay between the release and acknowledgement by other DNS servers around the world. If you use Windows, open the command line (Start / Run and type "cmd" <ENTER>) and use the ipconfig /flushdns command.
  • Check if i.brainking.com is not blocked in your browser's list of allowed sites to display images from. By default, it should not be blocked but it cannot hurt to know for sure. If you use Firefox, you can find this list at Tools / Options / Content / Load images automatically / Exceptions panel.
  • Check your operating system firewall settings if it does not block outgoing requests or incoming responses from the i.brainking.com domain.
  • Use CTRL-F5 key combination to reload the web page (which shows missing images) without using the browser's cache.
  • Right-click at the missing image location (it is usually marked as a red x at a white square) and select View Image action from the pop-up menu (it can look a little different in non-Firefox or non-English browsers). If nothing shows up, hit CTRL-F5. If still nothing shows up or an error message appears, it is likely that this image is really missing at BrainKing server - please contact us (info@brainking.com) with as many details as possible (at least include the missing image URL).

Hmmmm, the article is quite long now and I haven't posted even a half of my thoughts. To be continued. Next time, I will describe some of BrainKing myths and their real background.

About a year ago I posted a short article about Liquid's FON hotspot and since he has recently persuaded me that it is a good thing, I have connected and published my own FON node as well. Actually, it brings no advantage to foreign people but if you ever decide to visit Prague and go astray to the scope of my signal (and have a WiFi powered smartphone with a Skype client), you can call home for free, using my home internet connection. For those who never heard of FON, please find some information here. It is a very cool project, being supported by Skype, Google and similar big and important companies, and it is supported and promoted by us as well.

I am already tired now, so I have decided to publish the "BrainKing overview" article tomorrow, it would make no sense to do it today at all costs and omit half of important details because of my sleepiness. Meanwhile, who wants to experiment with loading time of BrainKing's Main Page and game pages, can try out a new option Use the "lightweight" version of BrainKing (disables many extra features but could speed up loading of pages) which can be found at the Settings page. Please note that it is mostly in a beta or pre-release status and it has not been officially released yet, so it might do no visible changes for you, but I think it's a good start and there are still many possibilities to make it better and more usable.