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Sunday, March 18. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 16)
- 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.
Friday, March 16. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 15)
- 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.
Wednesday, March 14. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 14)
- 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.
Sunday, March 11. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 13)
- 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.
Sunday, February 25. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 12)
- 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.
Saturday, February 17. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 11)
- 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!
Thursday, February 15. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 10)
- 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.
Monday, February 12. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 9)
- 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.
Saturday, February 10. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 8)
- 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.
Tuesday, February 6. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 7)
- November 2003 - of course, the reason of missing news for the previous two months is obvious - there was a big system crash which had destroyed all database records of more than a month history (or more than two months?). We, we were given a lesson that no security was high enough. A good consequence was that BrainKing's system of security and backup had been improved on several levels and simply makes a similar event impossible to happen again. We had also replaced some damaged parts of the database server and made the system much more stable (after a week of total downtime). Remember, it was still the first version of BrainKing which had turned out to be based on an ineffective code, as a result of lack of my former experiences.
- December 2003 - the site was recovered (as much as it could be) and the process of rewriting the source code (and preparing BrainKing v2.0) was started behind the scene. As far as I remember, no other important events had occured.
- January 2004 - the New Year had started with a timeout bug which had made my New Year celebration quite operative because I had had to restore several tens of wrongly timeouted games and disable the timeout checker for a while. Luckily, I was online when it happened. As, as many important issues, this one cannot happen again because the timeout system was fully rewritten as well.
Thursday, February 1. 2007
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 6)
There was nothing new in this category for a long time, was it? All right, let me continue.
- July 2003 - no big news during that month, most likely because of the summer holidays. Several options to tournaments (unrated tournaments - no BKR is affected, and private tournaments - only invited players can sign up) were added. As I have said, no breakthough at all, but the site was up and running.
- August 2003 - performance problems appeared, which was the reason why the automatic refresh of the main page was temporarily disabled for non-paying members. Although it didn't help too much, we had some time to pinpoint the problem source and replace the damaged parts of the database server. The second significant event of August 2003 was the appearance of the first Brain Maharajah membership level (which was created mostly as a joke but there are always nice people who want to support us). Six months subscription only but a great help anyway.
- September and October 2003 - it is funny but I cannot find any notes which would describe the events of these two months. It means that nothing important had occured. Or was I too lazy to post the news? On the other hand, it is no necessary to comment all months.
Tuesday, November 7. 2006
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 5)
- May 2003 - A controversal game of Gothic Chess has been added to the site. Actually, it was launched in March 2003 and announced as the Event of the Year (almost), although there was actually nothing to celebrate (but this fact was revealed later). For those who don't know the details - this chess variant is very similar to Capablanca Chess, which was invented many many years ago, but unlike Capablanca Chess (which is free to use), Gothic Chess was presented as a "licenced game", although the only difference (compared to Capablanca Chess) is in the start positions of two pieces. Since the "licence" attribute caused more problems than advantages (were there any at all?), it's not a big surprise that the game was completely removed from the site in 2005.
Anyway, this experience gave us an enlightment - don't bother to deal with anyone who wants to misuse your own popularity to promote his licenced product, it's a waste of time (and nerves). There are thousands of free games, which are not of a worse quality. And everyone can be happy. - June 2003 - Battleboats, Screen Chess and Crazy Screen Chess were added to the site. Since these games introduced a new game type where it is necessary to set up a start position before the game actually starts, a new page Game Editors was launched as well. Its purpose was to maintain a list of favourite start positions or unfinished patterns (for every user separately), in order to use them in games quickly, without a need to define them each time from scratch. And since many players (including me) are too lazy to create a start position manually, piece by piece, a one-click random position generator was added as well. It's a neat feature if you want to start a game as soon as possible.
And because BrainKing's primary focus is Chess, I added something new for Chess players too. Every Chess game page was enhanced by a new link "download pgn code", in order to get the particular game notation in a well-known format, which can be used to import the game to many Chess programs and continue to play/analyze outside BrainKing.
Tuesday, October 24. 2006
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 4)
- March 2003 - Pente, Keryo Pente and Janus Chess were added to the site. I was informed that what other sites call Pro Pente is actually Pente and Pente should be named Small Pente, in order to make it correctly. Confusing? I don't know and I don't care, the only important thing is that the games are supported and playable. About Janus Chess, the funny looking "doggy" picture which was used for the Janus piece had been ripped out of a Janus Chess program, so there is no reason to think that I would create it myself.
(actually, I prefer cats) I hope the Janus Chess players weren't too disgusted by it.
It was also a time of adding the game of Gothic Chess which was removed from the site after two years. The full story with all details will be posted later. - April 2003 - Oh yes, the BrainKing.info site was created and released. But it was not this current version, we had started with several simple static HTML pages, providing some basic information about BrainKing, its staff, technical background etc. The site was not updated very often, due to its static structure the update process was kind of annoying. I guess this blog system makes the overall experience much more user friendly (and easier to admin, for me).
The last important event of April 2003 was that I had passed moderating some public discussion boards to other users. The system didn't allow to add more moderators to the same board and there were no other neat features you can currently explore, but it was a good step forward. It would have been virtually impossible for one person (me) to maintain all discussion boards at once. And there are people who like to have a responsibility.
Thursday, October 19. 2006
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 3)
- January 2003 - part 2 - After a quick look at the News Archive and some personal notes, I've realized that more events than I've posted to the previous entry had happened in that month. I guess the most important one was the addition of Backgammon and its variants because, whether we like it or not, it is a popular game and many people were disappointed that BrainKing was not supporting it. Well, the reason was obvious - unlike chess, reversi, five in line and similar games, backgammon is not played on a square board and every possible combination of pieces on a pip must have its extra image, so it took some time to create all necessary pictures and I am not a graphician at all (hint - who wants to make a better looking backgammon image set for BrainKing and get a special prize? ). Anyway, launching this game was not straightforward because it was a new game for me and I was not aware of all rules (not to mention a doubling cube which was added 2-3 years later!). However, it was finetuned to the final version within a week or two.
(and auto-pass won't be done)
Dark Chess, Atomic Chess and Halma were added at the end of the month, along with an option of user defined tournaments. It was also a time of significant performance problems but this issue belongs to the February section. - February 2003 - The process of fixing the performance problems was kind of difficult because I had started to work for a new employer at the same time, so the BrainKing work was left almost entirely on Liquid. Fortunatelly we had found a solution after several complicated days by changing a database driver (one wouldn't believe what simple details can have such global consequences). I was impressed that even during this difficult time there were people who purchased a 2 years membership.
We have added prize tournaments and private tournaments in fellowships.
Wednesday, October 18. 2006
A short overview of BrainKing history (part 2)
- November 2002 - I had been told that something like WebTV exists and is widely used in United States and other countries. Well, it wouldn't be a big problem if this device provided a better screen resolution - due to complaints that some BrainKing pages were "too narrow" to show game boards properly, a row layout was introduced as an alternative to the default column layout. The row layout is an ugly one, it looks awful and I don't recommend to use it unless there is no other option. I hope a new BrainKing design will solve this problem by creating an universal layout for all web browsers at once.
- December 2002 - New games were introduced, although I've lost a record of exact dates of these additions. Maybe the News archive could give some hints. It was also a time of the first site crash, not a big one but BrainKing was down for three days because one of the server's disks had collapsed and there was no other server to replace the damaged one. Due to lack of resources, the whole BrainKing system was very unstable and could easily get jammed anytime. Fortunatelly, it is not a problem now. I wonder when we added the second server, in order to separate the application and database layers ... anyway, we did it.
- January 2003 - I don't think something important or interesting had happened every month but if I can recall a BrainKing event, I would mention it here. The beginning of the year 2003 had been marked with a release of the very first tournament system on BrainKing. I have no idea how it could have been working at all (bugs, bugs, bugs) but it was a good success anyway. Tournaments must be a part of every successful game site, of course. At least the number of paying members had been significantly increasing. People like to compete.
You might remember that the first tournaments had to be started manually by their creators because BrainKing had no system of regular tasks. It occasionally caused funny situations when a tournament sections contained games with nonexistent opponents or four times more table cells then they should have. The current tournament system is much more sophisticated, although some minor bugs are still waiting for a solution. But minor bugs are never critical.
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