BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

As we have announced in the Server News, BrainKing is currently under a process of optimization and tuning, in order to improve the overall performance and response time, mostly by rewriting certain functions that cause too much CPU load. There is nothing to worry about - everything is working OK and many players will probably notice no important changes. Anyway, I would like to clarify what exactly has been modified and why:

• Maximum number of games shown in one list has been reduced to 100. The reason is obvious - some people, who are quite reckless in joining more tournaments than they can handle, end up with thousands of started games and it is neither logical nor wise to display all of them at once. 10 years ago, when BrainKing had been launched, we didn't expect that someone would start more than a couple of hundreds games, but since the reality is far too different, time has come to do something about it.
  It means that if a player has more than 100 games to play, only the first 100 would be displayed, along with links to other pages containing the rest.


• Game lists are sorted by time left and it is no longer possible to change the column to sort by. After doing a lot of tests and optimizations, it turned out to be the most effective solution, regarding the site speed and fair user policy. I know that some people will probably miss the feature to sort games by, for instance, opponent names, but a similar result can be easily achieved by using the opponent and game type filter above the game list. The same filter has been added to user profiles where all started games of the particular player can be found.

After implementing the mentioned changes, a couple of small bugs appeared, as usual:

• Move and stay here function does not work and simply redirects to the next game. This is a known issue caused by overlooking one detail in the code.


• Play later feature does not work as expected. Actually, it was never totally bug-free and I planned to rewrite it a long time ago. Right now it is deactivated and its new version will appear soon.


• Some other Move and go to ... functions do nothing at the moment. According to the database, most of them are quite rarely used, so should not do too much harm if they are not active for a while. I want to observe how the implemented changes are performing and will finish the rest in a couple of days.


• Red numbers next to player names at the Friends online column don't appear unless you are viewing the main page (and sometimes not even there). This feature was dependent on another one that has been removed as an ineffective one, so it needs to be redesigned first.


• Number of games shown on the main page option from Settings / General page is ignored. It will be reactivated after removing 200, 500 and all values.

I hope I listed all important things here. If not, please leave a comment.