BrainKing Knowledge Base

You might have noticed a new link in the left column of BrainKing pages, called Events, just below Message Box. Starting today, all messages generated by the system (game resignation, tournament invitation, winner notification etc.) will be shown on this page, while the former Message Box would be used for personal messages only.

The reason is simple. I've made a fast lookup and realized that only 10% (or less) of all messages are actually sent by BrainKing users and it's easy to overlook them in the middle of the system ones, especially if you play many tournaments and don't visit BrainKing for 2 weeks. Furthermore, many people don't even read system messages and delete them without opening - and I cannot blame them. Sometimes, I do it too.

The Events page is probably not flawless because the whole structure of system event generation has been fully rewritten, in order to make it compatible with upcoming new version of BrainKing. Any suspicious behaviour of missing functionality can be reported to the Bug Tracker, of course.

There are people who like to change their BrainKing user name every week, some of them even more often. Well, it is not against the rules and if they feel compelled to do it, it is only their business. The only "problem" emerges when such a name chameleon suddenly forgets what name he changed to for the last time, which leads to "Help, I cannot log in BrainKing, it says invalid user name or password!" screaming and panicking. My mailbox confirms this theory because I receive this kind of message almost every 2 weeks.

The solution is very easy and it might be suitable for people who do not change their user name as well. Since today, it is possible to enter either user name or email address (which is registered with your BrainKing account) to the login form. And if you use your correct password, BrainKing should log you in. No matter how many times you modify your user name - just remember your email and you are safe forever.

The "User Name" label at the login form will be probably renamed to "user name or email address" soon. Until then, it is a hidden (but useful) feature.

I am sure that there are people who would never agree with me but an experience shows (and proves) that an average BrainKing user does not want to learn more complicated strategic board games at all costs but, shortly said, to have fun and compete with other users in many different ways. It does not mean that we would never add a new game to our site in the future but the priorities are split to a couple of sub-projects and all of them are being developed concurrently, so to speak.

And my current favorite sub-project is called Achievements because their total number has recently exceeded 200 and more than 100 other ones are already planned to implement in upcoming weeks. One of the newest achievements introduces the feature named Reward, the achievement itself is called Bonus conqueror and is related to nothing less than a free Black Brain Rook membership level which never expires.

In fact, it is not an easy task to achieve - a user must successfully catch all available bonus color codes and use them for 1 year or longer membership purchase/renewal. Some of the partial achievements are difficult to accomplish but it would make little sense if everyone can easily get them in a week. Let me explain the advantages:

• The standard price of the lifetime Brain Rook membership is 360 Euro which is equivalent to 10 years of a normal Brain Rook level. Since you need to earn 7 different achievements and each of them would cost you 36 Euro. The outcome is that you save 108 Euro, paying only 252 Euro - not a bad deal.


• It is not mandatory to use all required bonus codes for yourself. In fact, you can do a nice favor to 7 different BrainKing users who, for instance, cannot afford to pay for a Brain Rook membership - the Pawn Registry is a good source for this purpose. Another option is to dedicate some of these purchases to prize tournaments. And, as a reward, the lifetime Brain Rook membership should be more than an adequate result.


• Since every BrainKing feature or functionality is, in some way, connected to many other BrainKing features, it helps us test them much better if more people use them. I am sure that a stable and rock solid site is what everybody wants.

And I am really glad to see how many people are already hunting achievements and, as a side effect, playing games they never played before. This observation gives us ideas how to make the system even better and user friendly.

The system of vacation days at BrainKing belongs to the most controversial features of the site. Really. Some people like it because it allows them (under certain circumstances) to use more vacation days (for games) than their membership level allows. Some people hate it because it allows their opponents to move in games very slowly which usually results in tournaments that last more than a year. An unbiased overview says that it is a no-win situation because no matter how the vacation system works, it can never please all types of BrainKing users.

So we don't try to create a flawless feature but the best possible compromise, in order to minimize the group of annoyed players. The new vacation system has been created today and the most important changes are listed below:

• Each level of paid membership defines the maximum number of vacation days that can be used every year - 10 for Brain Pawns, 25 for Brain Bishops and Brain Knights, 35 for Brain Rooks and 45 for Black Brain Rooks. This is the same as before.


• After some vacation days are used, it is possible (twice a year) to get some extra days (during the same year) if the membership is renewed by another year (or longer period) - 10 after the first renewal and 5 after the second one.


• If your membership level expires or drops to a lower one, the system will check if the number of already used vacation days (of the current year) does not exceed the active level maximum. If it does, BrainKing will automatically delete all "future days" which are marked at your Profile / Calendar page. The purpose of this functionality is to avoid situations when a Brain Rook player marks all available 35 vacation days, then his membership expires and he can still use all marked days, even if his current level (Brain Pawn) allows to use no more than 10. After unpleasant dealing with a few smarties who had tried to hack the system in this way, I have decided to put this check to automatic.


• The system remembers how many days you used during the current year. If, for instance, someone is a Brain Rook and uses 20 vacation days (out of 35), then his membership expires nad after 1 month he decides to upgrade to Brain Rook again, BrainKing will give him only 15 vacation days for the rest of the year.

I hope that many BrainKing users will like this change. From my point of view, it should be the best option for all normal players.

Since BrainKing's FAQ (frequently asked questions) section was never updated since its release in 2002 and some entries became obsolete and non-valid at all, I have decided to solve this problem at last and create a new FAQ system. It is better organized (by categories, like login issues, game problems, membership related questions etc.) and easily extendable, which means that new categories and entries can be added on the fly, in order to address new frequent questions that can emerge in the future.

This FAQ page can be found at the same place as the former one - Information / FAQ link at the left column of all BrainKing pages. And since the collection of questions and answers is not completed yet, the page contains a link to the old FAQ page, for those who still want to recall some historical information. The old page will be definitely removed when the new one is declared to be finished.

Please don't hesitate to suggest new questions which should be added to the list, the preferred way is to post them as comments to this blog entry.

This is just an informative articles for all BrainKing users who still have problems to pay for a paid membership level due to "I have no credit card" issues. Everybody else can skip it at all.

First of all - this is not a breaking news type of message. PayPal Top Op options was released a couple of months ago, but since I didn't have time to drop a note about it, I am doing it now. If nothing else, this article can work as a reference.

OK, what it is about? Let me copy and paste the official PayPal description: Your buyers can now shop using their bank accounts.With a simple bank transfer they can Top Up their PayPal accounts and manage their money and spending. Safer. Simpler. Smarter. (sounds like a commercial, huh?)

And that's how it works:

• Open a PayPal account if you don't have one yet.


• After logging in, go to Top Up Account page.


• Follow the bank transfer instructions. You will be provided with a PayPal account number at your country (so you can make a local transfer), and a transfer ID which ensures that your money will be deposited to your PayPal account.


• Allow 2-4 business days to make the transfer completed. No fees should be charged by PayPal for this transaction.


• Once the funds reach your PayPal account, you can place an order through BrainKing Shopping Cart system and have your membership level instantly activated.

And if someone tries it out and can share his experience at the comments sections, I would be very grateful.

I have decided to solve a request which was submitted a long time ago but since the implementation was not the easiest one (and BrainKing could actually live without it quite well), there was always something more important to do. However, after adding Camelot as the 124th game type, the former idea has been refreshed and finally come to an universal solution.

The point is that many BrainKing pages contain a combo box with all supported game types, usually to select one for a game invitation, tournament creation, statistics filter etc. And it can be quite difficult to find a concrete game when there are 124 options to choose from. In order to make this process more pleasant, a new sorting option has been added to the Settings / General page.

Please find the Sort game type lists by option at the very bottom of the mentioned page. It can be set to two different values:

• Game groups - the standard selection, games are grouped by their "families", so Chess variants are listed first, followed by Checkers games etc.
• Game names - games are sorted alphabetically, using your current language version of BrainKing.

And the second good news is that Camelot rules have been added to the site as well.

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.

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.

Actually, it was released five days ago but since I prefer to post no more than one article a day, I have decided to write a few words about it today.

Google made an important upgrade of their language tools and added new languages to translate from and to. And since Czech in included there too (at last), it should be good news for everyone who has been asking me for a good English-Czech translator, most likely because Czech players form the third biggest group on BrainKing, so many people play games with them and a good translating service can significantly improve an in-game conversation.

Besides, the mentioned upgrade of Google language tools now supports 16 languages out of 20 BrainKing localizations. That's a nice step forward to break language barriers.

http://www.google.com/language_tools

First of all - since I have been told that white player starts a game of Italian Checkers, not black, I've made this change to the game model and it also affects all started and already finished games of Italian Checkers. So, if your pieces have suddenly changed the color, it is not a bug. I hope nobody gets too confused.

And now, what is more important - BrainKing starts a cooperation with Frank Berger, the author of professional backgammon software for Windows, Mac and Linux, called BGBlitz. Since today, every BrainKing user, who purchases or renews at least 1 year membership of any level, will get a 20% discount of a Player or Professional version of BGBlitz. The bonus would be displayed at the particular order page as a short description with customized PayPal buttons, so the only think you have to do is to choose the BGBlitz version and click the proper button.

It also means that BrainKing currently offers two bonuses to every 1 year membership purchase - 50% discount of a 300AD.com game and 20% discount of BGBlitz. Take them while they are hot.

A short comparing of different BGBlitz versions.

Let me summarize some BGBlitz features (copied from BGBlitz home page with a permission of Frank Berger):

• Play Backgammon against a world class opponent or play over the network.
• A tutor helps to improve your game.
• Rollout position with optional variance reduction.
• Choose between several themes. See the themes page.
• Train your skill with quiz databases.
• Train your cube handling in match play.
• Replay your games.
• Collect matches in databases.
• Convert from/to different match-formats and to HTML.
• Use the precise endgame database.
• Completely internationalised. Current languages are English, German, Dutch (Roger Troost), Italian and French (Radu-Dan Sabau), Spanish (José Manuel Solis Preisser), Danish (Søren Pingel Daalsgard), Hebrew (Shahar Tal), Swedish (Peter Nevalainen), Turkish (Özgür Albayrak), Catalan (Xavier Blanquer), Chinese (Angelita Li), Polish (Miroslaw Golda), Japanese (Katsutoshi Seki) and Russian (Oleg Timshin). Thanks to all of them.
• And more ...

Well, what should I add? I like to support all interesting projects which have something to do with board games and since backgammon is still the most played game on BrainKing game site, I am sure that BGBlitz would be worth trying for the majority of BrainKing community.

Although BrainKing's chat box is not filled with hundreds of messages every day (actually, at least the Czech room is kind of active), I like this opportunity to have a chat with currently connected people and since the static version of this feature (Chat room page) was created mostly for people with JavaScript-disabled browsers and provided no extra functionality, I have decided to change this status a little.

Starting today, the Chat Room page contains the following improvements:

• Older messages are displayed with date and time. It is useful in less frequent rooms where it is not clear whether the time values refer to the current day or some other day in the past.
• History can be browsed (pagination). If you missed a conversation because it is already pulled down by newest messages, it can be easily found by page links above and below the message list.
• Messages can be searched using a simple search form at the top of the page, and results are returned with the particular context links. It means that if the context link is clicked, the page containing the particular message is displayed and the corresponding conversation can be accessed as well.

But I still like the interactive JavaScript version more. However, I use the static one as a resource of historical data.

The recent article about different browsers usage on BrainKing game site has invoked a couple of questions whether the numbers are accurate enough or not, regarding real BrainKing users (just registered users, not visitors). Of course, the server log analyzer cannot distinguish between entries created by logged users and accidental passers-by, which means that if we want better and more detailed statistics of this kind, we need a help of BrainKing itself.

As of 1st May 2008 (it should happen after 2 days), BrainKing will start to store accurate and users-only information about web browsers, operating systems and similar non-private data which are important to calculate a real ratio of, for instance, Firefox 3.0 usage on Windows Vista etc., which will give us much better overview and should help us to make any further optimizations which are really necessary (because if this feature shows that some browser is used by less than 1% of all users, any optimizations for it would not have the top priority). In order to provide some meaningful information, no results will be shown for at least 1 month, although the data itself will be processed on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, there is a small update on the Ponds system - since today, it is possible to add personal notes to any pond you are currently playing, and the notes are visible to you only, of course (something like that already works for normal games). This feature might be helpful for people who like to keep track of previous moves of opponents, in order to plan their strategy.

I have been thinking about BrainKing optional features which require client-side scripting (JavaScript) to make them work, because it might be a little tricky for some users, especially when something suddenly stops working - for example, the smiley popup window. This article contains instructions what to do, instead of posting "it doesn't work for me" without any further information:

1. First of all - if something works for the majority of BrainKing users and does not work for only you or a few other ones, in 99% cases it is not BrainKing's fault (troublemakers are welcome to comment this note, as they usually do it anyway ). It means that the most straightforward way to solve the problem is to check own computer and web browser for anything unusual.
2. There are several possible sources of this kind of issues:
   • The feature is blocked by a popup ad blocker extension. Actually, it is very unlikely in case of the smiley window because it does not work like a typical popup, but if nothing else helps, it might be worth trying to change the particular browser extension settings or temporarily uninstall it at all.
   • The feature is blocked by a security application, similar to Norton Internet Security etc., which does not allow the browser to change already loaded page dynamically. Try to disable the blocking program for a while and see if anything changes.
   • There might be a hidden bug in the browser which did not appear before due to some circumstances. Try to open BrainKing with another web browser to see differences.
   • From time to time, a problem occurs when the system firewall settings are changes, at least I remember that some users had problems to load BrainKing picture until they fixed their firewall configuration.
3. If nothing helps, it is necessary to provide some information to analyze. I am not sure about other web browsers, but Firefox contains a neat error console which can be found at Tools / Error Console menu. It can be very helpful to copy and paste its content and send it to me, many anomalies can be detected in this way.

These instructions definitely do not cover all possible scenarios, but can work as a start point for any possible progress. A good cooperation never makes it worse.

I don't spend my time testing products in beta status too often (frankly, I don't remember when I did it for the last time) but since Firefox web browser is something what I use every day and I belong to the group of its supporters, I have decided to try out the most recent public beta version - Firefox 3 Beta 5 - at least to check if BrainKing needs some style modifications because of possible Firefox 3 specific behavior.

Well, after a few hours of active using and trying everything possible, I am impressed. Positively.

As far as I can say, it is definitely the fastest Firefox so far, most likely thanks to its new rendering engine. BrainKing contains many optional JavaScript features which look nice but can make a browser "a little" slower when all of them are activated at the same time, so it was one of details I wanted to test as soon as possible. And since all my attempts to make Firefox 3 jammed or at least overloaded by all possible popups, pulldowns, fade-ins or flying dragons absolutely failed, I can only say "wow!" to the programmers - this is definitely a big step forward.

This article is not meant to publish a full featured review, I just wanted to express my experiences and personal opinion. Which is exactly what blogs are designed to.

A very short overview of pros:

• It is faster. In some cases, much faster.
• It looks "nicer". It is hard to describe but I have a much better feeling when I work with Firefox 3, compared to previous versions.
• Smart bookmarks - the most visited pages are automatically bookmarked to a special folder. Right now, I know that my most frequent activity on BrainKing during last hour was to submit new entries to the BrainKing Translator database.
• BrainKing Bookmarks add-on work with it.

Cons:

• Many add-ons don't work with it because they are not upgraded to Firefox 3 yet.
• It is still a beta version, so it can be unstable on some platforms or computers.
• Regarding the previous point, some web pages can behave "strangely", as I heard from a few people. However, although I tried to display as many different pages as possible and did the worst possible things with them, I could not reproduce anything unusual. Strange. But good for me.

And a quick look to BrainKing statistics page says that 1.2% visitors of our site are already browsing the web with Firefox 3. That's a very good start.

Get it here if you want to give it a try.