BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

BrainKing statistics of visitors is showing more than 40 million page views in March. It is a significant growth, compared to last year, and confirms that many people visit BrainKing at least once a day. If I am not mistaken, we released 15 new games in the beginning of March, so it is not the worst example of a cause and effect.

The statistics page has produced another result (besides many others) which is very important as well - almost 40% BrainKing visitors use Firefox. I would like to add a note that any changes and additions to BrainKing pages are always tested on Firefox first (and then Opera and Internet Explorer checks are made), so the higher the Firefox usage ratio is, the more happy we are.

And since my internet connection has been down for almost 9 hours, there is nothing else to report today.

1) I am glad to state that our Firefox extension (announced yesterday) has received only positive responses, regarding its functionality, so it can be declared stable and anybody who wants to save any web pages to his BrainKing Profile by a simple right-click is welcome to use it.

I have released a slightly improved version 1.0.1 today - it contains an Options window (invoked by Tools / Add-ons / BrainKing Bookmarks / Options at Firefox) which allows to specify your preferred BrainKing domain and language version, because not everybody is using brainking.com domain and English language. Frankly, the real reason of that was to try out adding an options feature to the add-on structure but it might be an useful feature as well. I have also added an optional button for Firefox toolbar, so it's possible to open a Customize window and drag BrainKing button next to the current page address bar.

In order to follow standard procedures, the extension now has its own official page at Mozilla site:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6873

For some strange reason, it's not possible to install it from that page (returning an error code which has been already reported at Mozilla's bug tracking system), but it should always work from our own page: http://brainking.com/BookmarkExtension

2) It's been a long time since the last monthly action on BrainKing, so we want to release a new one on 1st April 2008. Nothing like an April Fool, it would be a real action with a real benefit for everyone who orders a paid membership.
More information soon.

I am a big fan of Firefox and its system of add-ons (extensions) - by the way, Mozilla has released a new version of its page of Firefox Add-ons recently - and since the problematics of the add-on creation has been wandering through my brain cells for a long time, I have decided to give it a try and created my first Firefox extension for BrainKing.

Actually, there is nothing to celebrate yet - it is a really simple add-on with the least possible functionality, created in 10 minutes (while 8 minutes have been spent on reading a not-too-well-written documentation and setting up the environment), so do not expect any miracles. On the other hand, it might be a nice complement of the recently announced system of BrainKing Bookmarks at user Profile pages, even in its very pre-release version.

All right, if someone wants to try it out and uses Firefox 2.0 or higher, please follow the instructions:

• Go to http://brainking.com/BookmarkExtension page.
• Click Install BrainKing Bookmark extension for Firefox 2.0 or higher link.
• Since the extension package is not located at the official Firefox extension site yet, it is very likely that a warning message - Firefox prevented this site (brainking.com) from asking you to install software on your computer. - appears.
• Click the Edit Options ... button. A dialog window shows up.
• A text field with a label Address of web site: should contain brainking.com. Click the Allow button.
• After the dialog window is closed, please click the Install BrainKing Bookmark extension for Firefox 2.0 or higher link again. An add-on installation window should appear and after the process is completed, you will be asked to restart your Firefox.

Very well, the add-on is installed, so what to do now? If you open any web page and right-click somewhere on the page content, you should see that the standard context menu contains a new item called Bookmark at BrainKing ..., prefixed with a brainy icon:

What you click this item, a new Firefox tab will be opened. The tab would contain your Profile / Links page (if you are already logged in BrainKing, otherwise you are asked to log in first), and the Page URL and Page name fields are automatically pre-filled.

The conclusion: Using this simple add-on, you can save any web page to your BrainKing Profile without installing any HTML or JavaScript code to the particular page URL.

Many things changed since the BrainKing beginning in October 2002 but one of the most important source of information (never changed) was the list of benefit of a paid membership.

Well, actually, there was no such list before, just a short note at the Paid Membership page and a very outdated table comparing different membership levels. And now, at least the second sub-page of the mentioned page (called Details) has been completely rewritten to reflect the contemporary status.

Please find it here: Paid Membership / Details

This is just a not officially released version because it is likely that I have omitted some details (who is supposed to remember ALL members only features?). If someone things that something important is missing, please let me know and I will add it.

And some small screenshots should be added too, I guess.

You might have noticed a small "brainy" button at the bottom-left of every article at this site. Its purpose is very simple - to make the process of bookmarking any page as quick and easy as possible. When it is clicked, you are instantly redirected to the Links section of your BrainKing Profile page (if you are already logged in BrainKing, otherwise you are asked to log in first), and the Page URL and Page name fields are automatically pre-filled. Submitting the new link form will store the new bookmark to your Profile and send you back to the original page, where the Bookmark at BrainKing Links button has been used.

Simple, huh? However, until this service is supported at other blog systems, the button is shown only here. On the other hand, it is very easy to integrate it to any page. If you want to test it, and give this "Bookmark at BrainKing Links" option to visitors of your own page(s), just add the following line to the chosen position of the HTML code of the page:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://BrainKing.info/bklink.js"></script>

That's all! The script automatically finds the page URL and title, so it's not necessary to set it manually for every page. However, sometimes it cannot work as expected - for example, when the page contains more sections with different titles and permanent links, which is not possible to detect and handle by the script. In this case, it is possible to insert a direct hyperlink code of this pattern:

<a href="http://BrainKing.com/en/ProfileLinks?url=*PageURL*&title=*PageTitle*"><img src="http://BrainKing.info/uploads/bksmall.png" title="Bookmark at BrainKing Links" border="0"></a>

As I have said, the BrainKing Bookmarks system will contain many more features when enough links are stored at the database. Hopefully, the bookmark buttons and other small improvements could help it a little.

BrainKing supports 18 Checkers variants (if I count Alquerque) and although rules of every variant are described at the particular game rules page, it might be difficult for an unexperienced Checkers player to find the one which would be the most convenient for him without reading the rule pages one by one. That's why I have added a short overview of all currently implemented variants, organized in a simple table.

The table is displayed at every Checkers variant rules page and contains the following values:

• Game type
• Board size
• Number of pieces
• Long moves of promoted piece
• Pawns can jump backwards
• Quantity rule
• Quality rule
• Preference rule
• Special rules

Deliberately, I have not included the "captured pieces are removed immediately or after the full move" column because this rule is not enforced in all required variants (e.g. Czech Checkers). When the new Checkers model is applied on the remaining variants as well, the table will be updated.

I hope that the table does not contains any mistakes - if so, please let me know and I will fix it.

Actually, the application has been released a few days ago but not fully approved by Facebook staff. Which is what has happened at last and BrainKing can be found at the list of Facebook applications, as the following screenshot shows:

Well, if we are lucky, it could promote our site a little and maybe even recruit new players. Any kind of promotion is useful.

The second news of the day is a new sub-page at BrainKing profile pages - Profile / Links. It works as a simple bookmarking service, so every registered BrainKing user can store and organize links to his favorite web sites there (I've been using BrainKing's Notepad so far and it's been kind of inconvenient, so to say). Please take it as a beta version - no special functions are activated yet because I need to collect more data (i.e. links created by BrainKing users) to make some experiments and performance tests. Ergo, if you want to help, feel free to submit some web pages and if you add nice names and descriptions to them, it will be even better.
And since all links must be approved by BrainKing administrators before they are listed at the particular user's Profile / Links page, it is guaranteed that no bad content would appear there. Safety first.

The possibilities of BrainKing users to modify a content of some pages has been expanded by a new option called Wall. First of all, it has nothing to do with playing board games but as I could observe so far, some people have a good fun with it. Anyway, it must be exhausting to play games continuously for a few hours, so why not to take a rest and do something meaningless but relaxing instead?

If you never heard of the Wall before (regarding BrainKing features), please read this short description:

• Go to your Profile page (after logging in) and you should see a new tab marked as Wall (next to Discussion Boards, I guess). The wall feature is disabled by default and can be enabled by clicking Click to enable your wall link.
• Once your wall is enabled, the Wall tab will become visible to other users who visit your Profile page as well. They can use the simple form on the same page to write a public message on your wall.
• When a new message appears on your wall, you can see a notification at your Main page. The notification contains a direct link to your Wall page, so it's easy to see new wall messages by a single click.
• It is also possible to delete messages which you don't like, or even ban offending users from writing on your wall at all.
• Your Friends page shows a little paintbrush icon next to your friends who have their walls enabled as well, so you can easily visits their walls by clicking the brush icon a leave a public message.

The public friends feature, introduced yesterday, now have its own statistics at the Statistics / Friends page but it is not related to walls at all.

I admit that that although social networking is a contemporary trend (whether we like it or not), I don't use them too much. All my friends are playing on BrainKing, so why to go elsewhere? However, every site can be a source of inspiration and if it contains something what people like (and it's not difficult to program), it is always worth considering - every added value is valuable.

And since we have something to do with Facebook, according to recent articles about BrainKing Application for Facebook, I have decided to try something and made a Public friends feature, similar to the Facebook one. This is how it works:

• Go to your Friends page (on BrainKing) and you should see a small padlock icon next to every friend name (if you don't have any friends, add someone first).
• The default status of the selected friend is private, symbolized by a closed padlock (). It means that your friend is visible only to you and nobody else knows that this user is added to your list of friends (which is exactly how it was always working).
• If you want to change the friend status to public, click the padlock icon. A simple form should appear, then you can write a message to describe your request (but it is not mandatory) and send it. The friend will receive a message from you and will know that you want to make him a public friend of yours. It is signalized by a question mark next to the padlock icon ().
• Now your friend has two options:
  • Accept your request - when it is done, the padlock at your Friends page will be changed to open () and your friend name (along with his icon and membership level) will be displayed on your Profile page, visible to everyone.
  • Reject your request - then your friend remains private and the padlock will be shown with a little "x" next to it (). It means that your request is rejected and you cannot send it again.
• The number of public friend requests is shown as a small red number next to the Friends link at the left column, so when you have pending requests to approve/reject, you will definitely know about it.
• The list of public friends at Profile pages is limited to 5 friends to show by default (otherwise it could occupy too much space) and it always displays the most recently active friends (sorted by their last action time). It can be expanded by clicking the show all public friends link below the list (if the total number of public friends is greater than 5).

Very well, what is the point of this? If you want to let everyone know that someone is a good friend of yours, the most straightforward way is to mark him public and everybody who visits your Profile will be aware of that. And browsing such a network of public friends can be a good opportunity to see profiles of many interesting people. Especially when this feature is available for all registered BrainKing users.

The first version of BrainKing Application for Facebook has been officially released today. If you are a Facebook user and want to experiment with it, here is a short list of instructions how to install BrainKing to your Facebook profile:

• Log in your Facebook account.
• Go to http://apps.facebook.com/brainking page (at the moment of writing this article, the BrainKing Facebook application is not approved by Facebook administrators yet, so it cannot be found at the Application Directory).
• Click Config and fill in your BrainKing ID number and authentication code. Both can be found on your BrainKing profile page.
• That's all! Now you should be able to see the list of started games at your Facebook profile page. More functions and options will be added later.

I like to see this kind of activity because an interoperability between sites is what I like and want to support. Please note that I am not the author of this Facebook application - if you have any questions or want to report bugs, contact mctrivia on BrainKing instead.

And we had the first spring day yesterday (at least at the northern hemisphere), BrainKing castle is no longer covered with snow and ice - you should see nice nice roses growing from the top of the towers.

Some BrainKing users already found out that a new field called Access code recently appeared at their Profile pages. Although there is a description of this feature just below the Access code line, I have already received several questions from people who don't understand its purpose at all, so I would post more information here.

First of all, the description at Profile page says:

"Access code is your unique identification string (generated by BrainKing). If you are using third party products to access BrainKing, you might be asked for this code to confirm your identity. This is NOT your BrainKing password, so there is no risk of accessing your private data if you provide this code to external programs."

And now, in details:

• There are popular community web sites (also known as social networking services) which allow users to create script-based mini-programs (also known as widgets) of various usage, in many cases to collect data from other web sites and present them is a customized form.
• Facebook is one of them (actually one of the most popular sites of this kind) and there is already a BrainKing Application being developed for it (not by me).
• Since the Facebook BrainKing Application can be used (or will be, more like) to display a list of your started games and similar BrainKing account related public information at your Facebook profile page (if you are a registered Facebook user), it is important to make sure that everyone can ask Facebook to displayed only information which belongs to his own account - that's why the access code is used here.
• As the short description says, providing your access code to third party services (like Facebook) is perfectly safe because it is not a substitution of your BrainKing password. The access code only helps Facebook to check that the BrainKing user ID (which is required to know which game list to download and process) is really your BrainKing user ID, because only you know your access code.
• By default, your access code is not set, because it makes no sense to BrainKing users who don't want to use any external services. If you want to set your access code, simply click the Reset button next to it, and BrainKing will generate a new unique access code for you. The button can be also used if you want to change current access code and generate a new one for any reason.

At this moment, the BrainKing Facebook Application is being tested with several volunteers and is not officially available yet. When it is finished and released, it will be properly announced at BrainKing Server News and here as well.

BrainKing has a good protection against robots who sometimes attempt to create fake accounts with links to porn, illegal or other types of inacceptable sites - as already described several times in the past, all new account requests are manually checked and accepted/rejected by administrators, so the chance of recognizing a robot activity is really high. However, when a malicious human, which is usually much smarter than an ordinary robot, wants to misuse BrainKing services for his own profit, it is often detected after a certain "bad" action is made. Luckily, there is not much harm to do since BrainKing does not allow a user to embed dangerous HTML tags or scripting code to any kind of messages, so there is no reason to be afraid of being infected by adware, spyware or other types of "wares" just be viewing BrainKing pages.

The point of this article is to bring an enlightenment to situations where a fake BrainKing account sends tens of messages of "I am a poor African girl and I need your help" type (it is also known as Nigerian Letter). The best way to protect oneself (and others too) is:

• Never click on suspicious links contained in a personal message from an unknown sender.
• Report this event to me as soon as possible. BrainKing administration console contains a functionality which, when it's triggered by an administrator, instantly disables the offender's account and removes all messages sent by this user from the database (which means that the messages disappear from message boxes of all attacked recepients).
• Never panic. Such things happen and the best protection against them is to know what to do and, which is more important, what NEVER to do.

By the way, there is some very interesting information to read about modern Nigerian spam and botnets (what is a botnet?).

This variant of classic battleboats game has been proposed by lukulus and, according to the author's words, it could make the game much more dynamic. Well, the description follows:

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Name of the game: Admiral Battleboats

• The game is played on a bigger board - 15x15 squares.


• Each player has 3 aircraft carriers (5 squares long), 1 submarine (4 squares) and 6 destroyers (3 squares). This number of ships should maintain the optimal ratio of water and playing pieces.


• A player has 1 shot for every own ship which is not sunk (just like in Battleboats Plus) except the submarine which gives the player 2 shots.


• As an addition, a player has bonus shots on the admiral's behalf - if the admiral stands on an aircraft carrier, the bonus is 3 shots, if he resides on a destroyer, the bonus is 1 shot.


• In every turn, a player can (after making all available "normal" shots) either take advantage of the admiral bonus shots, or move the admiral to any other ship except a submarine.


• If the ship which is hosting the admiral is sunk, the admiral dies too and his owner (player) loses the possibility of bonus shots.


• In order to eliminate the white (starting) player's advantage, he can use (during the first move) only shots of aircraft carriers and submarine, not destroyers.


• The game ends when one player cannot make more than 2 shots in one turn - his fleet is too weakened and decides to retreat.

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Just a side note - the answer to my question "how can the admiral jump from a sinking ship to another one over the whole board?" is "he is using a helicopter".

I have discovered this neat Firefox extension today and it has caught my attention because it reminds me of some BrainKing related "problems" (or requests for enhancements, more like). Anyway, let me copy the promotional text first:

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"If you love the Firefox web browser, but are tired of repetitive tasks like visiting the same sites every days, filling out forms, and remembering passwords, then iMacros for Firefox is the solution you’ve been dreaming of! iMacros was designed to automate the most repetitious tasks on the web. If there’s an activity you have to do repeatedly, just record it in iMacros. The next time you need to do it, the entire macro will run at the click of a button! With iMacros, you can quickly and easily fill out web forms, remember passwords, download information from other sites, scrape the Web (get data from multiple sites), and more. You can keep the macros on your computer for your own use, or share them with others by embedding them on your homepage, blog, company Intranet or any social bookmarking service. The uses are limited only by your imagination! Whatever you do with Firefox, iMacros can automate it."

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Nice, isn't it? And the BrainKing related problem is that I was requested to add a feature called automated greeting in game that would allow a user to set a message which would be automatically sent as the first message (in the particular game) to the opponent - most likely some players are tired of copying and pasting GL! to hundreds of newly started games and would like BrainKing to do it for them.

I am not going to argue which approach is worse - to send an automated impersonal greeting or not to send a greeting message at all. Anyway, programming something like that has a really low priority, so if someone cannot live without it, one of the temporary solutions could be to take advantage of iMacros for Firefox.

Download and install from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3863

I have decided to enable the BrainKing Chat Box for all registered BrainKing users, not only the paying members. This change is already active.

Yes, it is a big change, huh? A members only feature is suddenly accessible to everyone. Well, one of the reasons is that I need to test some new chat box functions (to be added soon) and since paying members are not too active in the chat (probably too busy playing too many games ), it is not easy to do without more chatting users.

Actually, this approach has some advantages. For example, if a new BrainKing user is lost and needs a quick help, he can simply turn on the chat box (or visit the Chat Room page) and describe his problem to other currently chatting users - there is a big chance that someone could provide an instant helpful response. It can be much more effective than posting a question to a public discussion board and wait until someone who reads this board too open the particular board page, because the chat box is displayed on all BrainKing pages, so it is available even while playing games.

And yes, there are some restrictions for non-paying members (Brain Pawns):

• They cannot use smileys.
• They cannot use allowed HTML tags.
• The chat box does not refresh automatically - in order to see new messages, they must send a new message or click the Submit button to make a manual refresh.
• They cannot change default Chat Box options - the only options they can see at the Settings / Chat box page is Enable chat box.

Now I want to observe if anything changes or not.