Be informed

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