Mighty Orion: you are getting the same as the rest of us LOLOL..........

After a while I find it is far better to play at ItsYourTurn.com, or find other sites. This site was the best at one time but has gone drastically down hill over the last few months. At one time you could talk to Fencer in PM, or on the boards, but these days it seems to be beneath him to even lower himself to answer you most times....

Mighty Orion: Well Fencer I'm sure will continue to say that is not his problem - since it is up to the ISP's of the world to update their DNS list. (which the change was caused when Fencer moved the site.)

But going to the IP address, it takes you directly to the site - unforntatly the site is configured to show images to the hard coded address of brainking.com - instead of the IP address.

I did some quick looking, but my memory about this is bad. (Maybe someone else can find something and help) - but I remember you could at once hard-code it in your PC (in a file like lmhosts or something) to always go to the IP address 89.187.130.22 whenever brainking.com is called for - but I can't remember the instructions (nor is it something you would want to do if you don't have to - since if the site ever changes again, things would be messed up.)

Again, maybe someone else can help.... I can't seem to remember much right now.

coan.net: I had noticed the missing images too but I failed to make the connection.  I haven't cleared my cache in a while so I suspect most game images are in my cache which is perhaps why I'm doing okay.  This is definately a DNS problem.  I'm honestly not sure who is actually responsible for fixing these kinds of problems.  I don't know a lot about how you register new IP addresses.

Anyway, I think lmhosts might be a UNIX/LINUX thing.  Windows has a "hosts" file in the windows directory.  Mine is
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Open the hosts file in notepad and add these following lines:

89.187.130.22   brainking.com
89.187.130.22   www.brainking.com
89.187.130.20   img.brainking.com

These will help...I suspect linux is similar.  I know nothing about MAC.  Someone else will have to help out here.

As a business owner I would think Fencer would be all over this.  If he is not, it's his business, he'll be the loser.  I suspect however, he may be busy working on it.

James

jryden: ? the ip address I got for the img.brainking.com was 89.187.130.22 not .20
Could this be the problem? (One of them anyway)

coan.net: I have figured something out!
It is definately a site problem in that certain items display and others do not. (for me) And only by entering through the ip address and not the domain name. (rem I can't get on through the domain name)Yes it may be related to the pointers and if so the question is... Who is in charge of making sure that the pointers are updated? Not me.
The ip address is the same for http://brainking.com and http://www.brainking.com as it is for http://img.brainking.com which is: 89.187.130.22 as you supplied to me. (I verified all of these at whatismyipaddress.com)
Yet the image of a smiley: smiley #1 for example...

http://89.187.130.22/images/smileys/1.gif will display for me and...
http://brainking.com/images/smileys/1.gif will NOT display for me and...
http://img.brainking.com/smileys/1.gif will NOT display for me.
The information is not being sent to me from BK to be displayed and eventually times out on my end.
These images are stored at BK and either the servers are not working right or the html code is not pointing correctly. Being that some people are able to see all of the images and some are not leads me to think that it is possibly a communication/time out issue at BK. I am using dialup through the att.net network and someone else might be using a faster network like dsl or cable (they may be on a faster network even if they are on dialup). It would be interesting to know who is getting on and what they are using and who is not and what they are using.
I hope that Fencer is working on this (I am making the assumption that he is and it is a difficult fix for him) and that he gives us and update asap.
btw... the ip address for brainking.info is 89.487.130.20 and I can NOT access that area at all.

coan.net: Yes, that's true. ISPs are obliged to keep their DNS lists updated and the only thing we can do for that is to broadcast the up to date information and "ask them" to accept it. There is a RFC describing this problematics and all serious ISPs should follow it. If not, I hate to say it again but it's really not our problem if some ISPs don't accept the general rules of the web.
Actually, I can improve BrainKing's detection system to switch to IP-encoded image paths when someone is accessing the site using IP address instead of domain name.
Generally said, it is an important performance improvement to separate images to another server and it's what we want to keep. I have recently implemented a smart detection system to BrainKing and the site recognizes when the image server is down, then it switches to internally handled images, until the image server becomes alive again. It is to ensure that BrainKing will always show images, no matter if the image server is running or not. However, it cannot handle DNS problems of users, of course.

Fencer: Yes, that's true. ISPs are obliged to keep their DNS lists updated and the only thing we can do for that is to broadcast the up to date information and "ask them" to accept it.

Yeah, but you can make your change the "right" way, or the "wrong" way. DNS records have a TTL (time to live). If I look at the current DNS record for brainking.com, the TTL is one day (which is a typical value). Now, if the TTL of brainking.com was one day before making a change, it means that it may take an day before everyone knows about the change. No ISP would be violating any RFC. The "right way" (that is, decrease the time it takes for everyone to notice) of making a DNS change is to first lower the TTL to a short period (say, 900 seconds), and do this more than a day in advance (a day because that's the old value of the TTL). That tells any name resolver that it should not keep an entry in its cache for more than 15 minutes. Then you make your DNS change, and you can set the TTL to one day again.

Now, obviously, I do not know how the DNS change was made, but judging from the reactions of the board, it seems that for about a day, people had problems with name resolving. Which seems to suggest a change to a record with a TTL of a day was made.

AbigailII: Liquid says that TTL was set to 1 hour or even less. I can only ask him to check it again, this stuff is not handled by myself.