BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

A short message to all Firefox avid users who would like to make their favorite web browser even more popular:

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Come on Firefox users, get ready to Set a Firefox World Record!

All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June (I will let you know) and see if it can set a record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours

You can keep track on everything here - World record attempt

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Thanks MadMonkey for bringing this to my attention. I am always glad to support Firefox and when the Download Day is known, I will post a reminder here as well.

Since one of BrainKing public opinion polls shows that there is a group of people who would like to play domino games on our site, we present a domino type game proposal this time. Created by Andy Lewicki, this time.

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Name of the game: Forky

• The game starts with 21 domino stones by removing all the doubles.
• BrainKing draws one of the stones, opens it in front of the players and the player that faces the bigger half of the stone, starts the game.
• The drawn stone is placed
  on the left side of the screen in such a way that the bigger half is closer to the middle of the screen. This tile is the beginning of the whole "train" and other stones can be attached to the this stone only from one side, starting from the bigger half.
• The winner of the initial draw may match the bigger half in a specific way only: Let's say the bigger half is an odd number, for example 3. He can match this stone with another stone bearing number 3 and the other half MUST be an even number or zero - so, now we have the situation that an even number is exposed and the next player has to match it, exposing an ODD number or zero.
• The game alternates, matching one half and exposing either even or odd numbers on the other half.
• A zero plays a special role. When a zero is exposed it plays a role as a joker - any number, either even or odd can match it and of course another zero.

This game is kind of open game, although, opponent's pieces are not exposed during the game. We have the situation with perfect information and the whole idea is to outsmart the opponent and play all the pieces before the opponent or block the game with fewer points on hand.

This game doesn't require good memory, since everything is clear from the very beginning and this fits perfectly for a turn-based site. The name Forkt reflects the skippy idea of allowed stones to be exposed.

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I would like to remind that opinion poll results don't make us obliged to do anything based on them, so although we plan to make some domino games in the future, nobody promises any dates. But it is a nice game proposal, anyway.

As I mentioned in the past (and not only once, I guess), I like to browse Firefox Add-ons page to look for new and useful extensions of this great web browser, and I give a special attention to the ones which address a problem of multiple languages, national characters etc., since BrainKing partially lives on it, regarding its 20 localizations (and I hope to increase this number in the future).

The extension I am writing about today is called Zombie Keys and it can be a very useful tool for everyone who needs to write non-ASCII characters (e.g. ä, õ, ¿, Ø) on an English only keyboard or a computer which does not support the particular language keyboard layout. Shortly set, this add-on implements Microsoft's Keyboard shortcuts for international characters (see http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/hfws.aspx?AssetID=HP051865621033), which means that it allows you to write any character with a help of a special combination of standard keys. Since I use an English keyboard almost everywhere, I find this tool very neat, especially when I have to include a non-English name to an English text, and don't want to make a complicated copy/paste from a Unicode character map.

Please visit the official home page for instructions or download and install it directly from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2335.

The entry of the day consists of several disarranged messages of different kinds:

• Our serverhousing provider has announced a firmware upgrade of Cisco switches, which are a part of our connection to the rest of the world. As a consequence, there might be a few short downtimes of the line, ergo BrainKing sites would not be accessible during these events. I hope that no serious connection problems will occur tomorrow and the process should last from 28th May 2008, 20:00 p.m. to 29th May 2008, 05:00 a.m. GMT+02:00. We apologize for any inconveniences (not caused by us this time).
• Recently released Firefox 3.0 RC 1 seems to contain a couple of serious bugs, which might result in a release of RC 2 version before the final one is completed and ready to go (with a certain delay, most likely).
• Since I like to use a keyboard only while typing a message in games, I have added another key shortcut Alt-Enter which works like the Move and go to *selected-game* button. It is an addition to the standard Ctrl-Enter shortcut, calling a normal submit action. I guess that I should start to write a list of all shortcuts because they are not fully documented yet and it is likely that more of them would be added in the future.

And that's really all. No new opinion poll features today.

The solution of the day is intended to help those BrainKing users who think that they are being abused by too active poll creators in some fellowships, and they don't want to solve it by turning off all opinion poll notifications because it is nice to be informed about "normal" polls from other fellowships or public category. The trick is to mark the "problematic" poll creator(s) as ignored, so you won't see any other poll notifications from the particular user at your Main Page. It works as follows:

• Open any poll created by the user you want to ignore (block). The easiest way is to visit Polls / Fellowships page and click the right poll name.
• Click ignore this creator polls link below the "creator" section at the top-right corner of the poll page.
• And that's all, you won't be notified about this user polls anymore. However, if you decide to vote anyway in the future, all polls you are eligible to use (ignored or non-ignored) can be found at the Polls page.
• Your list of ignored poll creators will appear at the bottom of the Polls page, so if you click the ignore link by a mistake, you can easily "unignore" the particular user with this simple form.

I would like to add that the most straightforward way to solve a problem with a problematic fellowship owner is just to leave the fellowship - in other words, to solve the cause, not the effect. It is really not mandatory to accept all fellowship invitations without thinking about it first.

Firefox is a powerful and robust web browser, but sometimes it can cause problems to less experiences users who accidentally turn on certain security blocks and don't know how to unblock them. It is not a rare situation in these times when annoying popups and different kinds of attacks threaten people on a daily basis, and since I was solving a real "my BrainKing images have suddenly disappeared" issue of one BrainKing user, I have decided to write this short article because it could happen to more people.

All right, what to do if you are using Firefox, an "ignore images from this domain" appears, you click on it and then want to make the particular images visible again?

• Go to Tools / Options menu of your Firefox window.
• Activate Content tab of the Options window and click Exceptions ... button next to Load images automatically option.
• Wait until a list of blocked sites appear. Warning! If you are using Spybot - Search & Destroy or similar anti-spyware program which automatically blocks blacklisted sites, it can take 10-20 seconds to activate the blocked list box, so don't panic and be patient.
• Find the i.brainking.com line and remove it.

That's it, you should observe no further problems with BrainKing images.

Right, Mr. Andy Lewicki strikes back again. This time we have a proposal of a dice-only game, which might be welcomed especially by players of Dice Poker and similar "no board, no pieces" games.

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Name of the game: Risky Die

• Each player has 6 dice, which are grouped to 3 sets of 2 dice.
• A game consists of 10 rounds. BrainKing randomly sets values of all 6 dice in the beginning of every round (for example, 4/2, 6/5 and 1/1). It is important to point out that both players get the same combination of dice values.
• The goal is to make the least possible "gap" (difference of values) between dice of each set.
• During a round, a player has 2 options to do with every set of 2 dice:
  • Do nothing and just use the current "gap" as a score.
  • Select one die and roll it. If the rolled die shows the same number as it had before the roll - the player is busted and gets a penalty of 5 points. Otherwise, the difference of values is counted as a score.
• The player collects points from every set of every round. When all 10 rounds are completed, the player with smaller total score is the winner.
• (Optional rule to be discussed) In order to avoid "empty rounds", a player is obliged to make at least one roll per round, even if it means to destroy a good pre-rolled combination.

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Comments?

I think that every fan of Firefox web browser should check the official page of Firefox Add-ons and spend a couple of minutes there, at least four times a year, because nobody knows what interesting ideas can appear there as simple extensions to download and install and one could think "why didn't I use this neat tool a year ago?". Actually, I do it almost every week and even if no new add-on catches my attention, at least I get inspired for my own work - BrainKing Bookmarks add-on is a result of one of such browsing sessions.

I like when I can pass a boring action to machines which never get tired of a repetitive operation and I guess that one of the most annoying events to happen while browsing favorite web sites is when the particular site suddenly goes down (yes, BrainKing is not an exception). TryAgain is an elegant solution of this problem, because it does this "reload the page to check if the site is up" job automatically for you, so you can concentrate to another things until the desired site/page comes back to life. And it should work with Firefox 3 as well (at least Beta 5), which is good news too.

Download here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2462

At least I can post something which is not about opinion polls because all important features of this recently introduced functionality are already implemented and tested (or aren't they?). Of course, there are still some pending issues, e.g. to allow translators to maintain localized versions of public opinion polls to make them accessible to non-English speaking BrainKing users as well, but since we don't have too many public polls at the moment, it is not absolutely necessary to do it immediately.

Since the fellowship pages contain really many information and became not too well organized, time has come to make a little refactoring (something what had happened to user profile pages in the past). I have decided to start with team matches section because

1. it is located at the very bottom of the particular fellowship page, so it is not too convenient to scroll down to see it,
2. it occupies too many space when all team matches are shown at once,

so it is moved to its own sub-page and a little reorganized.

The new matches section of a fellowship page displays only open matches by default, in order to find them by a couple of clicks if a team match invitation message is accidentally deleted before accepting/rejecting a challenge. The page also includes a simple form to located matches by their type, game or name pattern. I believe this improvement will be a positive change for everyone who wants to track his fellowship team results and search archive data, from time to time.

... although I thought that today's entry would be about something else.

Never mind.

• The Polls page is organized just like the Ponds one - the page is divided to Public and Fellowships sections, which gives a better overview of all polls you are eligible to participate in. The selected poll list also indicates which polls are still waiting for your vote and which of them you decided to ignore (see the next point).
• Instead of hiding the poll notification box at the Main Page once and forever, it might be more convenient to mark selected polls as ignored - once it is done, they will stop appearing at the Main Page, so you can be notified about polls you are really interested in. However, you can still vote in ignored polls, if you find them at the Polls page.
• When a poll is finished, BrainKing will automatically send a notification to the creator and all participants. The message contains the final number of voters and a link to the poll, so it can be easily checked for the final results.

Now I hope that everyone (or at least almost everyone) is happy with the result and there is still a chance to add an improvement or two, if someone has a good idea of a new feature.

Right, the former fellowship-only feature has been turned to a public one (as an addition, not a replacement of the previous version) and made even better with a help of the following improvements:

• There is a new item Polls at the left menu column of all BrainKing pages. The Polls page contains a list of public opinion polls - polls which are open to everyone, ergo all registered BrainKing users (any level of membership) are allowed to participate and vote. Public polls are created by the same people who are already maintaining Team Tournaments.
• A new public discussion board has been created. It is called Opinion polls and if you want to suggest a topic for the next public poll, this is the right place to post your request.
• The Polls page can be used as a reference of new private (fellowship) polls you are eligible to participate in. The page lists open polls of all fellowships you belong to and it hides the ones which already contain your vote.
• Nice blue bars have been added to the percent values of current votes of the selected poll.
• If a new poll is created and you are allowed to vote, a notification would appear at the Main Page. The notification box contains a hide link, so if you are bothered with that and don't want to be notified about new polls, click this link to turn it off. Notifications can be turned on/off at the Settings page as well.

Please don't forget that although polls have been made public, their purpose is to give BrainKing users another possibility to express their opinions, but no poll results can influence our internal priorities of implementing new games or features. We can take them into a consideration but don't promise anything which could be based on the polls.

Very well, BrainKing has a system of opinion polls (since yesterday) and it seems to be successful, thank you very much. I am already flooded with requests of new poll features and I think of some other improvements myself, so there is still a lot of work to do. However, the basic functionality should be OK a that's the most important thing.

A few additions or bugfixes are already implemented. Let me summarize them:

• BrainKing smileys are supported. It means that you can use smileys in opinion poll names, descriptions and even answer options. Let's hope that it will be used reasonably and the polls won't become too animated and flashy.
• There was a small bug which caused that an optional poll description did not appear at the particular poll page. It is fixed now.
• The list of opinion polls at the Fellowship / Polls page has been changed to a table, containing more values - name, deadline, poll creator and number of voters. Yes, it is really voters, not votes, because it is possible to make poll with more than one answer option per user, so a simple sum of all votes would not be relevant to the real number of participating fellowship members. By the way, if your poll shows 0 as the number of voters, it is not a bug, it just means that the counter has not been recalculated yet (since the last poll system update) and it will be automatically fixed when the next vote is submitted.

That should be all, I guess. There are more ideas to implement, sooner or later.

Since today, the system of BrainKing Fellowships contains a new feature called Opinion polls and its purpose is exactly as one expects an opinion poll to work. I would like to point out that this functionality is not fully tested yet, so it is more a beta version than a full release. However, unless I have missed or overlooked something, it should work fine, more or less.

Now, in details:

• It is a fellowship only feature, so you won't find any opinion polls outside fellowships. Every poll is limited to the particular fellowship scope.
• There is a new sub-page at every fellowship page, called Polls (next to Main Page and Waiting Games tabs). It contains a list of all opinion polls created within this fellowship.
• Only the Big Boss or Little Boss of the fellowship can create polls.
• There are two basic types of polls, which allow to select either just one option (answer) or one or more options. These two possibilities can be distinguished by an usage of radio buttons or checkboxes.
• When a poll is created and released, its deadline is displayed next to the poll name at the poll list. Prior to this date and time, all fellowship members can make or change their votes.
• When the deadline passes, BrainKing automatically closes the poll and no further votes can be made.
• The number next to Polls tab header indicates the number of open polls where you didn't vote yet.

I am sure that there will be some bugfixes and improvements before I call this feature completed and finished. Meanwhile, all Bosses are welcome to test it.

BrainKing still lacks single player games which could be played against yourself or computer (except mctrivia's AI Ludo Player, of course). Actually, I want to solve this "issue" in my own way "soon" but it is too early to reveal any details.

Luckily, there are other solutions and one of them is made as a neat Firefox add-on with a simple and descriptive name Cards.

It is curious that the add-on is available since 2005 and I wasn't aware of it prior to this afternoon. I think the reason is that it never made it to the list of favorite extensions chosen by Mozilla team, although this fact is a mystery too. Anyway, this Firefox extension allows you to play a nice collection of popular single player card games directly in your web browser (Firefox), invoked by a simple Tools / Cards menu item click. It can be a pleasant way of relaxation, while you are waiting for your BrainKing opponents to make a move.

Download it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1562 or visit the add-on page at http://cardgames.mozdev.org/.

By the way, if you start this tool for the first time and don't see any cards, just use your mouse to resize the game window.

Unfortunately the add-on not compatible with Firefox 3, although it would require only a simple change in one configuration file (of the extension package).

Speaking of Firefox 3, the Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 version has been officially released. Many language localizations can be obtained here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

I would like to drop a line about user icons and profile photos (not to be mistaken with photo albums). I am sure that many people observed that a non-existent image is shown where an icon should be, for some BrainKing users, and the reason of this small issue is that it is always a little risky to release a formerly admin-only feature to public.

All right, what is it about?

• There are Activate/deactivate icon/photo options at profile pages of paying members. These small forms used to be available only to BrainKing administrators in the past, but due to enormous amount of request from some people to disable their icons for any reason (don't ask me why), I decided to enable this process to everyone, which means that any paying member of BrainKing can simply deactivate his profile icon/photo if he feels like that.
• However, this function is probably a little misleading because other people have been trying to "activate" their icons without uploading them first. That's not the right approach. And it would not be too meaningful to write a FAQ entry about it because not everyone reads how-to descriptions.

Very well, it has been fixed at last. The mentioned activate/deactivate icon/photo forms are available only if the proper images actually exist for the user, so if you don't see these options at your profile page anymore, please try to use the Profile / Upload icon link to provide some image first.