Board for everybody who is interested in BrainKing itself, its structure, features and future.
If you experience connection or speed problems with BrainKing, please visit Host Tracker and check "BrainKing.com" accessibility from various sites around the world. It may answer whether an issue is caused by BrainKing itself or your local network (or ISP provider).
If you look at the Player List sorted by join date, it's what you might expect, the longer a person is here, the more likely s/he is going to upgrade to non-pawn status. This is still quite a young site. With 200 members, starting last October, that's about 30 members per month, right? Of the people who joined during the first 3 months (last year), there is a higher percentage of members than the site average.
I would also expect that Fencer could do (or has done) a few database queries to see what the average number of moves a person of each level makes on this site. I would expect that most pawns make lots of moves when they get here, but only a few of them stick around and keep making lots of moves per day. My guess would be that 70-90% of the pawns just try the site for a while and then abandon it for the most part.
Of course, these are just guesses.
I like the current free evaluation system, and 20 games seems like a good limit. One thing that Fencer, et al., could possibly do is to target the pawns who are making lots of moves with a little stronger marketing campaign. It could be something as subtle as placing the "Support Us" link on a more prominent place on the page. If the site used advertisements, it could be "ad-free" for pawns up to a certain bandwidth, with more and more obnoxious ads filling the page as the bandwidth got higher. Of course, paying members would be ad-free no matter what.
Just a few ideas from a rather newbie to the site (who is getting quite hooked on it quickly).