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 obviousl