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).
Gabriel Almeida: Vouchers sound good. I don't have time to code an automatic system for it, though, so they would be handled manually. It's not a big issue, I guess.
speachless: I don't think we have a general problem. Mostly because:
1) Fischer's Clock had been introduced many years ago and nobody ever complained about any suspicious behaviour. Yes, there were some complaints but they had been caused by misunderstanding the concept of this feature.
2) No problem of this kind ever happened to me, not even during the test phase. I am sure that a serious anomaly would have been discovered a long time ago.
3) Although I don't have time for a serious and thorough investigation, I've had a quick look at the source code. Everything seems to be normal and as it should be.
So, my best guess is that aaru was unlucky to find a specific combination of parameters that causes the issue he described. Unfortunatelly I cannot provide more information at this moment.
speachless: Hmm, it's kind of sensitive part of the code and I still didn't have time to make any safe modifications to it. However, I've just removed all tournament signups of the mentioned users (for tournaments that were not started yet). Please let me know if they manage to sign up for more and I'll try to find time for a more effective solution.
Hmmm, it's really sad (but not too surprising) to see that some people will always try to exploit the system. Very well, it can be fixed this way:
1) A user cannot have more than, say, 100 tournaments in the "open" section of the Tournaments page. Do you want to create more? OK but wait until some of your tournaments start.
2) If a user membership expires, tournaments created by them (in the "open" status) will be automatically deleted, except the prize ones with prizes already provided.
3) Regarding the single eliminations tourneys, that might be a bug because pawns should not be allowed to sign up for another tournament if they are already playing (or signed up) another one. But the code is really old (8 years?) so I am not sure about that. I'll look at it.
Anything else? Sorry, I am totally consumed by other projects so I could easily miss other issues mentioned in this conversation.
DeaD man WalkiN: BrainKing is 100% popup free (have you seen any ads here, except plain text ones?). It sounds like an adware/malware/spyware/whateverware installed on your browser or computer.
_Road Runner___: The server log says that 6469 emails were sent in last 2 days. Are you sure that yours are not blocked by an anti spam filter or something? Anyway, BrainKing just sends emails, it cannot guarantee that they are actually delivered.
rabbitoid: It's not dependent on it, it just uses it for statistics. A small JavaScript should be loaded and executed after the page content is fully loaded.
crosseyed: "The customer is always right" - if you want to believe that, it's your right, of course. Give me some time and I'll try to elaborate a little.
crosseyed: You clearly have no intention to understand what I say all the time (well, not a big surprise because you are not the first one). I see no point to make any more attempts to explain.
crosseyed: Let me quote from the Paid Membership page:
"The player is not limited by number of started games at once nor number of moves per day nor number of joined tournaments and team tournaments, is limited by 35 vacation days per year."
That's what you are guaranteed to get. Everything else is "maybe, but maybe not, depends on the situation". Please try to deal with it.
Regarding your comment "If Brainking is no longer your top priority you should hand it over to someone else" - if you are interested, give me a good offer and we can discuss it.
crosseyed: Maybe you should have read more carefully what you paid for. You have a right to play more games, create fellowships, tournaments etc. There is nothing about "you will be guaranteed to have a site running without any problems ever" or "you will never have connection problems", and it's not there for a very good reason. I could also say that I find your response (and permanent complaining) very insulting. Then we can insult each other on and on, if it makes you more happy. I prefer not to discuss it with people who only see their own problems and nothing else. Anyway, I am the one who decides what my priorities are. If you don't like it here, you can always play elsewhere.
It is true that some people can have problems to access BrainKing. BrainKing itself is OK and running fast, but for some strange reason the server occasionally fails to provide new connections, so the generated page never reaches your web browser. When I have time, I'll try to do some tuning, but since I am very busy with many other things (you might have noticed that, after 10 years, BrainKing is not my top priority any longer), it's hard to make any estimate, especially when I have no idea what could went wrong.
crosseyed: Since the site itself is fast and running without any problems, it seems that only some routes are affected. It usually means that there are problems with certain network nodes which is out of our reach (so we can only wait).
You might have noticed some connect problems that started about an hour ago. I have already notified the ISP (the issue is on their side), so I hope they will fix it soon.
Well, since I don't have any problems loading any BrainKing pages, there is no issue with the site itself, otherwise it would be slow for me too. It is probably a network problem, more like.
Carpe Diem: 7/10 is still a fraction. We are not a charity. This opportunity had been originally created for people who received some bonus codes in the past, so they don't need to make 7 different orders but only 5 or 4 (for instance).
Anyway, I know of several players who really placed 7 orders and got their Black Rook for 252 Euro.
Carpe Diem: Actually, the "Sort next games by" option is obsolete (and should be removed) because games are sorted by time left only due to some performance issues we had observed in the past. It means that "next game" is always the game with the least time left to make a move.
rabbitoid: In order to make such a tool safe and easy to use, I would be something like "Click to fix this tournament" button anyway. A script to check all running tournaments once a day and fixing the bugged one seems to be a better solution.
Guys, when I have time for it, I'll try to fix all such tournaments at once. But now I cannot promise any date, I am quite busy with many other things.
Hrqls: Good! If nothing goes wrong, I might be able to release the first beta version within a week or two. It already connects to the server and shows some data (games to play, number of new messages etc.), so I hope the rest won't be too difficult to add.
Konu: Re: how to avoid beeing added in team tournaments without asking before
speachless: There is not option like that. When people join teams, it is expected that they want to participate in team events (matches, tournaments). The easiest workaround is to leave the particular team (or all of them).
(sakla) If you click on a person's name and then click Finished games you will have a list of games that have been completed, then click on the name of the game to get a summary of all of these games, then click on the name of the game again and you will have a game to view and analyze. (Servant) (Bütün ipuçlarını göster)