Czuch: hmmmm maybe possible, as the time out process detects activity (or not) i believe.

Well, its there if people want to use it, and hopefully will keep this board clear a bit lol

MadMonkey: I wonder... would it be difficult for Fencer to have us automatically redirected to that addy when this site takes too long to respond?

Bernice: Well, with Fencers permission i have set a forum up on Google

At least it may help people find out if it is a site or a local problem.

Everyone is welcome to join the BrainKing Discussion Forum

Then if you can not access the site at some point, just head there and hopefully you will be able to find out what is going on lol

Czuch: it is the easiest thing in the world to set up an independant chat room...well it used to be....I had one on my "FREE" geocities site...I have just checked and I STILL have a chat room on my site....and it works....hasnt been used since 2001.

It wouldnt be too hard for someone to set one up specifically for the use of BK users now would it,......

Okay kids, we all know that Andrersp is one of the people being referred to, he is upset about the auto pass deal that Fencer made and he will harp on Fencer for it, and Fencer will play the game too by making veiled digs....

now that is out, can we all move on now?

Andersp: Of course. They prefer to play games instead of wasting their (and my) time with attempts to start a useless argument on a public board which is supposed to provide meaningful information.

Fencer: I think most people at BK know what the site owner prefers

Andersp: The site owner always prefers to say what is the best for the community, not for any particular user. And he really does not care about "that's brave" opinions.

Fencer: so the site owner prefers to say A ("certain users" not Mad Monkey) and not B (the names)...thats brave

Andersp: No, because it would start an off-topic thread with a significant risk of an unfriendly atmosphere and that's what nobody wants here.

Fencer: So, if we ask you who those "certain users' (not Mad Monkey) are, would you answer that question too?

Andersp: It would be pointless because it's me who is answering questions. I don't ask any.

Fencer: If you ask them by their names instead "certain users" (not Mad Monkey) they might give you an answer

Andersp: Most likely they think that sending annoying complaints can be helpful. My opinion is different.

Fencer: I still think that "certain users" (not Mad Monkey)  are sending annoying complaints when they want/need an answer.

Fencer: Thats one of your favorite words, is it not ergo

Did you know that was an old board game. Its quite a good game actually, i have it in my cupboard.
In fact, see if i can find it on the web


Found it HERE

Its like a cross between Five in Line & Hasami Shogi

rod03801: Yes, it's a small bug because graphs are generated by an instant user action, ergo they must be displayed internally.

Fencer: I think it would be great, and immensely helpful to those who are not up with Computers & connection problems

If we had a separate place to go that people could remember to look at if they could not access brainking itself

Best have a chat to coan.net, mctrivia or someone else who has there own place, if they would be happy about it

The only images not working for me right now, are the graphs. Fencer, you are probably aware of this, but I thought it couldn't hurt to mention, just in case you aren't.

MadMonkey: Sure, if someone creates a discussion board dedicated to BrainKing elsewhere, I can make an official link to it and place it here and to the BrainKing.info site as well.

Andersp: I talk when I have time to talk. It has nothing to do with a frequency of complaints.

Czuch: I have written a new blog entry today, which suggests some possible solutions. And yes, contacting your ISP is a good too.

Fencer: True, i know i read them all as well

As you are having a question day
Is it possible to have a brainking Discussion board based somewhere else (maybe mctrivias or coan.net site)
In other words, if someone can not access brainking we could goto a board there and just ask if it is a all round problem, or something closer to home.
That is the most irritating, the not knowing
I had to be up for work 5.00 the other morning, so i came on before bed to catch up on those games that may time out.

As for others the site was inaccessible, but how long could or should i wait for

Maybe coan.net or Rose or someone could have an access to turn on the suspended timeouts, until you can get here the next day, but if there is no site access, do not know how

Just an idea

Fencer: Maybe those "certain users" think that sending annoying complaints is the only way to make you talk?

Fencer: Well what can we do then? Can we contact our local ISPs and complain to them? Somebody somewhere must have an answer?

MadMonkey: Perpetual complaints posted by certain users (not you) are annoying as well. We must live with many annoying things and I am sure that intelligent people cope with it.

Czuch: I never said that BrainKing was blameless. But there are problems which cannot be solved by us because it is not technically possible.

Czuch: I just typed that into my Notepad, yours is worded better though lol

True, i do not get how people from every continent, can all have a site problem with the same site at the same time, yet it is nothing to do with the site

Something weird and VERY annoying i know that

Fencer: Well, if you are paying them for a service, you certainly have a right, and a duty to complain when their service isnt up to standards!

I personally dont understand, and I am sure I am not the only one, the technicalities of what we are talking about.

But it seems logical that if it isnt something being done wrong by brainking, and it is a problem with local ISPs or other local companies, then how can it be that we all have problems at the same time, when we are all on different ISPs and the like?

Are we talking semantics here?

For example, if brainking keeps changing something and the local companies have a hard time keeping up with these changes, then yes, it is not technically a brainking fault, it is a local companies problem, but you cannot really say that Brainking is blameess, can you?

Czuch: I am experiencing a permanent bad performance of PayPal or eBay and I just accept it as a fact, being a direct consequence of the web structure. And I don't complain anywhere about it.

Jason: It has to be very bad luck for sure, that out of the thousands of web sites, it is Brainking which gets the unlucky poor performance by all of our local companies

Jason: I am glad to see you smiling when accepting the truth.

Fencer:

Fencer: oh lol
Well i have 17 players signed up ready for when you do

MadMonkey: Nothing like that has been implemented yet. Most likely it's just a buggy side effect of some other improvement.

Hello world
Can any other Big Bosses see a Random Team on there Team lists in Fellowships now
I have one, but it just appeared, i did not have to set it as a Team like normal.
Now i have had a couple of people ask me where to find it.
All i can say, is that it appeared after i set up a Random Tournament for the madhouse

Do you know Fencer ?

Fencer:
ah okay thanks

"Snoopy": I don't think it should be called "so much" because, as my stats page says, the site was down for 3-4 hours, which is not a tragedy, compared to a recent Skype's 4 days continuous downtime, regarding the fact that BrainKing is maintained by two persons, while Skype is owned by eBay, a really big company. Well, to answer your question, the new BrainKing rack contains 4 machines (+ a switch) and it's not an easy job to configure and finetune such a pool of servers, especially when BrainKing is not the only service which runs there. It is necessary to survive a couple of downtimes, which will finally produce a better, safer and more robust system.

why was there so much down-time yesterday

Jason: If you mean the situation when your browser says that it doesn't know the brainking.com domain, then yes. That's a problem of local DNS resolving and cannot be affected by us.
However, there is still a chance to try any other domain (brainking.cz, brainking.de, brainking.es etc.) and switch to your language. In some cases, it can work.

Fencer: so for people who dont want to try and work out what you just said , you said it isnt BK that hasnt any problems but it is our ISP providers ............

Actually, I have some free time today, so if someone wants to ask a question (which would not be off-topic at this board), feel free to do it. Of course, nobody guarantees that a satisfactory answer will be provided.

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.

Looks like the server is running again. Just start playing again.

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: 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

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.

or2ak.com: I guess you wont sell that lap top?  

I have mentioned this B4 and dont understand why, but...
I dont think its always a BK issue or a ISP issue. 
I have trouble sometimes with BK (not at all this last 2 weeks as others have complained about which is weird)  but I only have trouble on my desktop PC.  I can boot up my laptop and NEVER have an issue with BK.   I dont know why, its very strange.

Sometimes I will be on my laptop playing here and the wife gets on the desktop and cant log on BK (strange? I think so)   So I dont think its always a BK issue or ISP.   So is it my PC?   Hmmm  well, that means lots of us have the same issue with our PCs (whatever it is  LOL)   But, like I said, how come I never ever have a problem when using my laptop?    If its a BK or ISP issue, I shouldnt be able to get on here like most everyone else.