ellieoop: What is 'ie7' and 'ff' please?

i think that the BK pages are a little bigger than some others, and consequently take longer to load. all the links, the pictures, and javascript all add to the load time. brainking has a lot of these kinds of things

I've had slow loads at other gamesites too. I don't think its only BrainKing.


At least for me.

beach: i went back to ie7 and play at night when there's not many ppl here and i sail right along, i luckily have not had any problems with slowness or pages not loading. when i'm on ff, it's slower and the pages are jumpy.

AbigailII: ah ok ... i know too little about that ... too bad .. i hoped i had a small escape in case .nl was inaccessable :)

Hrqls: They could be routed differently if they have the same IP address, and it could be they are routed identical if the IP addresses differ.

pauloaguia: true ... i remembered again how to lookup an ip address :

http://www.who.is/whois-nl/ip-address/brainking.nl/
http://www.who.is/whois-com/ip-address/brainking.com/

Hrqls: All BK sites resolve to the same IP address, except for BrainKing.info and BrainRook.com, I believe.

AbigailII: i wondered if they would have a different ip address .. if they could be routed differently .. but i know too little about that

Hrqls: Whether or not two addresses resolve to the same IP address doesn't say anything whether they are the same website or not. Some identical websites have more than one IP address, and a single box (using one external IP address) can host hundreds, if not thousands, of completely different websites.

Now, I would assume that the only difference between brainking.com and brainking.nl are just a set of language dependent templates, but stranger things have happened.

brainking,com isn't any better just took me 10 minutes to make a move have done it 3 times hit sumbit and site goes down, certainly frustrating this morning

rod03801: ah ok ... brainking.nl wasnt accesible .. but brainking.com was ... and then brainking.com wasnt either

is there a difference between brainking.nl and brainking.com ? do they point do different ips ?

rod03801: According to my FasterFox Add-on, this site is taking over 90 seconds to even respond (thats when i do not get the Connection was reset message or a white page), compared to just under 2 seconds on every other site i am logged into

Hrqls: I believe the site was just inaccessible for a couple minutes. I got booted for a minute or 2.

is there a difference betwen http://brainking.com and http://brainking.nl ?
i just couldnt connecto to the .nl one .. but i am connected to .com now

to all those people that i am playing against,i am going to be away for few days,as i am going to be a grandmother for the 3rd time,i hope to be back to this site by next week..
sorry for the inconvience.

Andersp: Oh, I also agree - but there is little that we can do since apparently it is not the site, but many many many users problems.

But a long time request that I would still love to see - a very very basic all-features striped off version of BrainKing - that is when playing a game, all the comes up is the game - none of the unnecessary things loading on the page. Yea yea yea... all those unnecessary things suppose to only take 1/24th of a second to load.... but something slows things down.

beach: Same here, it's frustrating with fisher clock games ... whereas i used to play a few hours before if i was busy i'm now forced to play at least a day or two before so i know they're ok .. only been bad for about 5 days here, but i'm the same as you and give up after 10-15 games.

Andersp:
I agree this is supposed to be a game site simple as that, and the speed to play games on this site is just awful lately, I usually just give up now, and all other sites work super fast so its not my connection or my computer

coan.net: I still think that an average player prefer a site where he doesnt need to spend most of the time "testing changes" to make the site move a tiny bit  faster.  

I wrote this back in March, and doing these things helped me a lot with the speed of the site:

Computers (coan.net, 2007-03-12 20:16:01)

Play with the different settings - find out what works best for you.

tonyh:
try playing the site as a pawn by turning everything of in java script and you be amazed on how much it speeds up

rod03801: Done the smileys bit - and it seems better.

LOL, and one more thing, I personally found that Rich text Editor slowed things down a bit too.

Oh, and to repeat, going to Javascript and de-activating smilies there DID NOT help.(That was the first thing I tried) I had to do it the way I described.

tonyh: Above the text boxes. (Next to "Change message area size")

Click it and it takes you to a Settings page. Scroll down. Near the bottom you will need to put a check mark in "Activate User Smilies"

I only have about 10 smilies now that load each time a text box shows up. (You know? When you click on the "Smiley" above the text box, the ones that show up that you can just click on to have them appear in the text box)

I have DSL. When the newer batches of smilies were added a couple months ago, any page with a text box started taking 15-20 seconds to load! (As opposed to 2-3 seconds for most other Brainking pages)

After I emptied it, I added back in my most frequently used smilies. The ones that I found that slowed things down most significantly were the tip-toeing smiley, and the newer blue smiley that bounces back and forth. (I didn't go much further than that in my experimentation)

rod03801: I turned off all smiley's.. so they don't load at all .. no change..

Fencer:  Why waste time by making options for the "know how guys"?  Normal players dont care about configuration profiles, changing smileys and so on, they want an easy accessable site where they can PLAY GAMES!

rod03801: Where do you find 'Change Smilies', please?

Rose: If your main problems are on discussion board pages, or pages where it is time to submit your move, (Basically any page where the text box shows up), I highly reccomend going to "Change Smileys" and emptying them out. I found that the more recent smiley additions must have "huge" smileys. (I'm talking about when the batch including the smiley was added). After I emptied it out completely, all pages where the text box shows up loaded at their normal speed of 3 to 4 seconds! I then gradually started adding smilies, and sort of found out which ones were slowing things down.

Shutting off smilies in Settings was NOT enough.

I was so frustrated for weeks. MOST brainking pages were loading in 2-4 seconds, EXCEPT any page that included the text box. Those were taking 15-20 seconds! (And I have DSL)

It's worth a try anyways! It worked for me! (I now only have about 10 smilies in my "change smiley" area.)

pauloaguia: Mmmmm. Interesting idea. But it could be done.

Rose: Check with different browsers. For instance, nowadays IE7 only displays a page after it was completely loaded - larger pages, like Boards with 100 messages, will simply take longer to display. Check if changing browser helps at all.
Also, it it's happening to some players and not others, then it may be because of their BK's configurations. There's loads of things you can enable or disable and some of them do have an impact on performance, no matter if Fencer syas the site is working great or not. I remember coan posted something about it some time ago. For instance, I have most of the game comboboxes disabled, only display 5 messages per page on boards, have no context menu, smilies popup disabled, etc.
But if if you try and disable certain features, and reduce the load per page, and see that the site starts getting faster then post it here - it will help others know what to disable and help Fencer know he has to optimize that feature...

Fencer - anych chance we could have different configuration profiles? That way I could simply choose a profile to use at home and another to use when I'm on a wireless connection with less bandwith.
It could also help on testing different configuration profiles - I'd change all settings with one click and could immediately see if it had any impact on the site's performance at all...

Purple: Oh I know.. Im avoiding most public boards due to the long load time.. Every page takes up to 55 seconds to load.. then youre in purgatory if you get doubles in gammon. That is a 5 min turn for sure.. Im just glad to hear Im not alone. I thought I was going mad.
But what does a person do when told there is nothing wrong with the site, the server that it is on or the connection speeds?

Purple: The short moments when the site works good are easy to count but  Fencer continue to swipe that problem under the carpet :(

Rose: Oh but it does work badly for others. My webtv is like a nightmare. It takes 5 minutes to get on any discussion board and then when you get there you see something brilliant like LOL. Hardly worth it at times.

tonyh: Same for me for the last two weeks. I play very few games due to the long wait for pages to load. I keep getting the same message when I ask, there is nothing wrong with the site. I dont get why it works great for some and horrible for others. NO matter where they are located in the world!
Frusterating to say the least.
I thought it was my machine but other sites work great. I checked my net connection, my router, my modem, different browsers, this and that.. All other sites I go to work ok.. Why BK works sooo bad for me but not for others stumps the heck outta me..

pauloaguia: It's been like this for weeks!!

tonyh: that I'm not experincing slowness and neither "Website not found" messages.
Of course, I posted my message 2 whole minutes after yours. Maybe Fencer was updating the site however. It usually gets offline for about a minute when he does that...

pauloaguia: What say you?

tonyh: Working fine for me...

Why is BK so slow in responding and why does it keep going to 'Website not Found'/

All right. I've sent Vikings the questionnaire. No more questions for him, please.


I've also asked Vikings to suggest someone else. Viking's made his recommendation and since she already had some votes from other people too I contacted her. Since she aggreed... she's next.


And so, from now on, all questions should be about...





All questions for...





First, (and to add to the suspense ), a new rule: it's true that the voting and the recommendation systems help select people that are more or less known in the community and that people may have an interest in knowing more about. But that also means that the interviewees will always be "famous" people. And sometimes it's well worth to learn something about someone we hardly know as well. SO I had to figure out a way to choose not so famous people as well.
It's also not fair to just ask all these tough questions and never be selected for an interview.
So, from now on, for every 5 questions you ask, it counts as a vote on you. The 5 questions don't have to be all in the same interview (and though you can ask more than 5 questions per interview, I'll only consider you asked 5 for this count). Maybe this will also be an incentive for some more people to start sending questions.

Now, where was I?


Oh, right!
And the next interview will be about...





Bubbles Pbarb2


You have until 11th November (11/11) to make up some questions for her.

In the meantime, you can keep sending suggestions for the next person to be interviewed after Bubbles.

Fencer, i just downloaded another Firefox Extension called Youlicit

Its a handy thing to have if you are looking for sites like the one you are viewing. Great for finding new games to play and also if you are looking for information any any topic really but without having to search for it, so useful for project work & things like that.

Anyway, when you hit the Y button from within BrainKing it comes up with lots of sites with lots of board games, thousands that i have never heard of, but maybe when you have a spare hour or so, you could look at some of them and the games that are out there, you maybe able to borrow some for the future here, or get some ideas

One thing that will please you, if you are on BugCafe (Scrabble, Canasta & stuff) and you hit the Y button, what comes top of there list with 100%......................................
........
........
........
........yes, you guessed.......

BrainKing.com

this post has been redicted to the tournaments board

Okay, thanks. I think what i did was when I right clicked and did not want to use anything, then I tried to escape by clicking on the "x" at the bottom, but that just disables the option all together, instead I have to left click again to get it off my screen

Czuch: I can not see why Firefox should have anything to do with BrainKing Settings

Firefox is all i ever use, and i use my context Menu all the time

Now it is happening all the time? Maybe something I have set in my firefox options?

I noticed that my context menu option on my settings page was turned off? (it was on last night) Is this a function of clearing my cookies? Its the only thing I have done, that I can think of.

What other functions are possibly affected?

wetware: Thanks, that sounds correct to me.

I guess if you want your own fellowship listed at the top, you have to add some symbols to the beginning of it, or make it bold letters, or something like that!

Czuch: Oh, and favourite boards appear to be in ascending alphabetical order by name.  I don't see a way to change that either.