- June 2006 - we created a 2+1 action - everyone who had purchased a 2 year membership of any level, could choose a friend who would receive 1 year of the same membership level. Ideal solution for couples.
 And BrainKing released Ambiguous Chess - an interesting and original chess variant invented by on of our users, almost the first one - after Capablanca Random Chess. We always supported the idea to give users an opportunity to create a game of their own and have it implemented on BrainKing, because such cooperation usually brings many advantages to all involved parties.
There was also one negative announcement - due to continuous problems with our PayPal account and its limitations (unfortunately they didn't treat all merchants from all countries equally) we had decided to end the PayPal support on BrainKing by the end of the month.
- July 2006 - the bad news finally turned to good news - the PayPal support was renewed and everyone could use this service to pay for BrainKing memberships again. Good for all. Since the online payment system is not easy to use worldwide, it is always better to offer more options to choose from, and it would be a pity to remove one of the most popular ones. And BrainKing launched its very first experimental contest called action points. It was accepted with different opinions - some users liked it as a new option to get a free membership, some users did not - but the traffic of BrainKing site was definitely increased and that was one of the positive consequences.
- August 2006 - after a success of the first action points contest we released the second one with slightly improved rules and new prizes to win. We also extended the monthly action by adding a Black Rook Special (who purchased this level during August 2006, could ask for a new feature on BrainKing which would be implemented with the highest priority) and giving out several commercial games by 300AD.com and Rake in Grass as a bonus.
And this blog site BrainKing.info was created as well. I guess it's not necessary to continue writing the historical events because the daily entries give much better and detailed information.
- March 2006 - and here we have finally come to a problem to recall historical events because the regular monthly announcing of special actions had caused a lack of any other Server News entries. On the other hand, the History category of the blog is almost finished and since the blog itself contains much more detailed information about BrainKing related events, it is a better reference anyway.
Never mind. The action of March 2006 was about the possibility of "everybody who purchases a new membership or extends the current one, can create a prize tournament with the same membership as the prize for a winner for free". As a consequence, many good prize tournaments had been created and many new users were aware of this interesting option to get a free membership.
- April 2006 - the special action of this month was very different to the previous ones because it introduced BrainKing's own system of online advertising. Everybody who purchased a new membership or extended the current one, could place a text advertisement to the right column to promote own site or any other favourite pages for free. The duration of showing this advertisement depended on the length and level of the purchased membership, of course, because who paid more, got a bigger bonus. The popularity of this event was disputable - not everyone likes to see advertisements, even if there were text only and very short. But, at least, we had tried something new and that's exactly what every successful site must do, in order to remain successful.
Furthermore, we solved a long term problem of correct colors in some games. When BrainKing had been started, I thought that a white player was the one who started all games. It is not true, of course, and since the number of games on BrainKing became too high to keep ignoring this fact, we released a global fix for all affected game types. There was a little confusion when white pieces suddenly became black and vice versa, but since we had announced it in Server News in advance, people accepted it as a must-have improvement.
Go and two variants (played on 9x9 and 13x13 boards) were added to BrainKing at last, this popular game had been requested many times in the past and now we are glad to have it. As a small bonus, the game Connect6 was implemented as well.
- May 2006 - it is nice when the rules of special action of the month come from someone else who suggests it and takes advantage of it at the same time. Thanks to that, the May 2006 action was about Black Rook membership (which never expires). Everyone, who purchased this membership, could choose another user who would receive the same membership for free. In other words, it was a 50% discount of this membership level and many users realized that it was really profitable for them.
And we released the game Lines of Action too.
- December 2005 - the Christmas Action of the year 2005 was started. Well, not a breakthrough of any kind, simply a free month to every new or extended membership, but which other game site did that as well? We also added a Froglet variant called Sphere Froglet It started an interesting discussion (or argument) about the difference between a sphere and a torus. Well, not all BrainKing users are mathematicians or know what a torus is, which was the main reason why I had decided to use the word "sphere" at the game title instead.
- January 2006 - January Action was annunced just after the December one and it was about 200 free Brains to each membership purchased during that month. But what is more important - it was the start of regular monthly actions. In other words, beginning January 2006, BrainKing offered a special action every month, and this trend was not stopped yet. We also added a Chinese and Italian localization of the site.
- February 2006 - BrainKing introduced single elimination and entry fee tournaments. The February action was created and everyone who ordered a membership had a 50% chance to get the same subscribed period for free. We were also forced to make a small increase of membership fees due to exchange rates (+ 2 Euro), otherwise it would become too disadvantageous to accept payments in any other currency except CZK. And, as a bonus, we released a system of team matches - a captain of a fellowship team could send a team challenge to another captain of another fellowship (of the same game type team) and play a team match, fully controlled and maintained by BrainKing.
- September 2005 - BrainKing's shopping cart system was implemented which allowed us to track all membership or other orders, keep a well arranged history and make the process of purchasing more subscriptions at once much easier. After a week or two, there was another BKR history recalculation due to a rounding error in the formula and the BKR values became accurate at last. It was also the time of releasing Capablanca Random Chess which replaced Gothic Chess (scheduled for a total removal) and another Chess variant, called Los Alamos Chess, was added (the first supported variant with 6x6 board). The total number of chess variants was set to 25.
- October 2005 - that month made an important milestone for Backgammon players because we added a doubling cube for Backgammon variants. It really pushed the Backgammon playing experience much further and enabled many new strategies to play this game.
- November 2005 - we introduced the Stairs system, an another system which sorts players by their skills, as an alternative to tournaments and BKR charts, similar to "Ladders" which were created on some other game sites. The number of BrainKing localizations was increased by two, thanks to the Russian and Spanish translators. And, as every year, a Christmas Action was announced - a free month to every new or renewed membership.
- June 2005 - it seemed that people really wanted to have BrainKing localized to their native languages because four more full translations appeared in June 2005 - Esperanto, Romanian, Swedish and French. Should I add something? Only that it was far beyond my former expectations.
- July 2005 - there were several scheduled downtimes, mostly due to application server conversions (which could mean almost anything and I guess that we were recalculating BKR histories again because it's nice to have accurate values if the previous attempts were no 100% positive successful ).
- August 2005 - Xiangqi and Shogi were implemented, initially with westernized pieces only, the native ones were added later.
After a week we increased the number of supported games by five - Legan Chess, Knight Relay Chess, PahTum, Hasami Shogi and Great Chess, the last one with a kind permission of Christian Freeling, the game inventor. It was a good feeling to deal with a nice guy who did not need to make problems with licenses, patents and other annoying things because we already had bad experiences with such gothic behavior in the past.
We removed the 2700 limit of BKR maximum because many players reached it and had no motivation to play on, and we also added a rule of removing inactive players (6 months for paying members and 1 month for the rest) from the BKR charts. It was necessary because we had to solve a problem when a user occupied the top positions and stopped playing, so nobody could replace him.
International wire transfer payment option was added. The total removal of Gothic Chess on 1st January 2006 was announced.
- March 2005 - this month started a heated discussion about nationalities, discrimination etc. Why? Because 13 people made an agreement to sponsor the Brain Maharajah tournament which would award a winner with this unique membership level. The only "problem" was that nobody but users from Czech Republic could sign up for this tournament, as the tournament's creator condition. Well, the affair was a little exaggerated. Everyone who wants to sponsor an event with a prize, has the right to define specific conditions, no matter how restrictive they can appear to be. And since the tournament is already over and the prize membership had expired as well, everything is all right.
- April 2005 - 6th April 2005 was marked as the Day of Internationalization because we released the first non-English and non-Czech localization of BrainKing. Thanks to the great work of the translators, BrainKing was fully translated to Portuguese which one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It was the first step to make our site open and available to non-English speaking people. Yes, I had to rewrite many parts of the source code, in order to make it ready for more than 2 languages, but it was definitely worth this effort and I wish to have BrainKing translated to as many languages as possible.
- May 2005 - the number of discussion boards was reduced by combining the boards of game variants into one, in order to keep the board system better organized and prepared to the launch of new language localizations. Which turned out to be a good idea, because four BrainKing translations were released in this month - German, Slovak, Turkish and Dutch. Way to go!
- December 2004 - we have announced a Christmas Action of a 1 free month to every new subscription (or a renewal), just like in previous years. People like to get Christmas presents. I was also honored by a visit of David Soucek (son of a famous Czech writer), known as Bad Bishop on BrainKing, who came from Vienna (Austria) to meet the BrainKing creators personally.
 (actually, he was visiting him mum who lived in Prague as well) And he had told me about an interesting multiplayer game he was used to play with friends on a chat site. After a consultation of the rules and some experiments, the game Run around the Pond was added to BrainKing, getting a good popularity almost instantly.
- January 2005 - there was a funny "deja vu" effect caused by a misconfiguration of BrainKing's resource files, so it was using the backup database instead of the live one for several hours. Not a big deal but I learned to check all changes twice before uploading them. And it was another opportunity to improve the BrainKing system of new releases.
Pro Five in Line and Swap Five in Line were added. These two variants were requested by experienced Five in Line players who were bored by the classic version when the starting player can always win. We have also enabled the creation of own Ponds for members with Brain Rook or higher membership level. After two weeks from this announcement, another two new games were implemented - Hyper Backgammon and Fisher Random Chess.
As I can see, there were many news entries in January 2005. The last one was about adding an option to move banner ads to the bottom of pages (for paying members only) and the Server News system improvement, applied on Fellowship News as well.
- February 2005 - Due to planned upgrade to a higher version of our database, we decided to improve the password encrypting algorithm (because the former one was no longer supported) and asked users to change their passwords, in order to make this change activated. As usual, many users ignored this appeal, so when their passwords stopped working, they flooded my mailbox with requests of password renewals. Not a big surprise. We are used to this.
- September 2004 - since the summer holidays are only in summer, there were no important news in August 2004. But September was a month of real richness, regarding the number of games supported on BrainKing. Let me summarize it - Jarmo, Alquerque, Froglet, Espionage, Jungle, Cylinder Chess, Amazon Chess, Berolina Chess, Anti Froglet, Spider Linetris, Small Espionage and Fast Espionage - that makes 12 new games in one month. This record was not broken so far (although the January 2007 release was very close to it) and simply means that we are never fully satisfied and want to improve our game site continuously.
- October 2004 - we developed a new system of timeout calculation because the former one (a heritage of BrainKing 1.0) was slowing down the site too much. Since this new system required an automatic synchronization process (to show the time left values correctly), it made several users confused. Fortunately, not for a long time. The second improvement of that month was the release of BKR graphs for paying members, after generating the tables of historical values, based on all finished games since October 2002 when BrainKing had been launched.
- November 2004 - there was a major failure of the database server, so we had to move the database itself to the application server and temporarily run everything on only one machine. After a day, everything was back to normal. Although system failures are not too rare and usually not worth mentioning in the history, this one was significant because it was the only event (so far) which helped me to make Liquid write the news entry himself. And I guess that it will not happen again because he seems to prefer to work, instead of talking about the work.
- May 2004 - hey, what about February, March and April? Since the news archive shows no logs during this time range, it was probably fully spent by developing the announced BrainKing 2.0 application. Based on a brand new framework (created by me as well), it was promising many new functions, much better performance and scalability, and similar neat features. We had announced the Big Release for the beginning of June 2004 and performed final tests, with a help of some volunteer testers. By the way, I wanted to get a name for the framework but couldn't think of anything meaningful, so it was left nameless. The only possible advantage would be if someone wants to build his own site based on BrainKing engine but I don't expect it happen.
- June 2004 - right, we had released the BrainKing 2.0. After several minutes we had turned it off and started to investigate what is wrong. Simply said, it was consuming too many system resources because of some forgotten infinite loop or deadlock in the code. After detailed exploring I had pinpointed the problem source and decided to relaunch the former BrainKing 1.0 for one more week, just to have enough time to fix the bug once and forever.
After three weeks, the BrainKing 2.0 was launched again. That time it was a success and BrainKing 1.0 application could be thrown to a virtual trash bin. And, as a side effect, three new games had been released - Amazons, Battleboats Plus and Dark Battleboats.
- July 2004 - since there were no more critical issues with the newly released BrainKing 2.0, we could focus on a development of new features. During July 2004 we had added BrainKing Store where people could purchase BrainKing t-shirts, the very first Team tournament (in backgammon), the first version of User Agreement (containing rules for all BrainKing users) and the Bug Tracker to allow users to report bugs and track their status.
|
