Happy Birthday, Fencer :)

My prediction is that we should see separation of the processor and the display into two distinct physical devices.

1985 called, they want their idea back!

But then you can upgrade one without upgrading the other

You realize you can do that already with PC hardware? And not only the display, but like - everything!

(I usually try to stay away from those debates because they're useless. It's just like the browser wars or in the old days the editor wars, in the end it boils down to personal preferences, and everybody that thinks their favorite product would be the right one for everybody, just because it works for them, is just being narrow-minded. Plus IMHO both Windows and Mac OS suck, so I avoid them whenever I can. Doesn't mean I run around and tell every Mac or Windows user they're being stupid. But I found it mildly funny that you would bring up things as a positive idea for the future that have always been one of the drawbacks of the whole "hardware and software from the same vendor" thing you are praising. To me it is an extremely repelling thought to get both out of the same hands. Not because the product is necessarily bad. But because you lock yourself in pretty easily to one vendor. And locking myself in is something I try to avoid like the plague.)

Bernice: Have you tried switching to the "Simple" layout? And to activate the "lightweight" version in your settings?

Bernice: http://brainking.com/en/Settings?p=1 there you can turn on automatic vacation.

bicot: http://brainking.com/en/Board?bc=88 <- c'est le forum francophone.

Summertop: LOL, what kind of trouble would you be expecting? Some strange secret service guy knocking at your door?

Hrqls: OK! It wasn't me who discovered it, and that's what I told the person to do. Just wanted to make sure that this is the course of action to be taken. Thank you :)

How is the current policy on multi nicks? There is a player that is losing games to another player with nearly exactly the same nick name and with exactly the same "real name" - and then the losing account is playing against other players in public tournaments. Will they be banned?

Snoopy: They should - otherwise you could ignore the whole stairs and be immune to challenges...

Marfitalu: Wow, he reminds me of Jeckelchen who won countless Line4 games against Jeckel in 1-8 moves

Hrqls: Well, that's exactly how I understand http://brainking.info/archives/207-Team-ratings-and-new-smileys.html:


"The formula to calculate BKR is the same as for classic BKR for players (so a team must finish at least 4 matches to get a BKR), but instead of game results of team participants, the whole team results are used and they are taken from both team tournaments and simple inter-fellowship team challenges. And although this feature is not fully finished, speaking of integrating to more parts of the site, it already provides BKR graphs with the rating history, and lists of top ratings and positions at the fellowships pages."

Roberto Silva: Exactly! One team match, be it a normal challenge or a match during a tournament, counts as one match for team BKR calculation. And I guess there aren't any team tournaments in which you play less than 4 matches!

Gordon Shumway: Actually it was invented nearly a year ago: http://brainking.info/archives/207-Team-ratings-and-new-smileys.html

MadMonkey: I think it is based on team match and team tournament performance since one of the recent piles of team tournaments started and several improvements to the team system have been made.

Andersp: That's terrible! I just made 20 moves in that time... By the way: I played around a bit, and had the feeling that the time it takes to make a move is also determined by your current goto-option. It seems to be pretty fast when I have it set to "go to the next game", and it seems to take much longer when I have "go to the next game of this type" for instance. This might be a random observation, but I could imagine that the database lookup for the latter option is taking longer (perhaps because there is no index that combines timeout date and game type...). Anyone had the same experience or was it just a coincidence?

Eriisa:

Eriisa: On windows, open a DOS box and type tracert brainking.com. You'll experience a timeout though, after the IP address 212.23.50.58. That timeout is the BrainKing server. It doesn't answer to ICMP traffic, so it gives you a timeout. Thus you can't use it for time measurements, but you can see the route.

Jim Dandy: The problem is - you can't tell that unless you actually are in that area. And it isn't usually area specific. I am on ADSL 3000, but I could easily have the idea to switch to Modem or ISDN or whatever slow connection. Or I could have the same basic connection speed, but maybe my ISP has speed problems in my area from time to time, or let's too many people share bandwidth, or whatever... There are quite a couple of possible reasons for a slow connection to a specific site, and you can't tell unless you try.

srnity: Shhh, I'll PM you about it

Andersp: I see... So it's gotta be the white list...

TarantinoFan: I'd like to point out again, that not everybody is having the problems you are talking about. I don't have them, and there are others who don't, and who stated it here right on this board. That doesn't mean no problems exist, but it makes it kind of unlikely, that those problems are on BrainKing's side (since we don't believe in a white list theory, right?). There are many routers and networks involved when the page data is transferred around the world. I just traced it, and my route passes 13 hops, but they are located in just two networks. So my ISP has a pretty decent connection to the ISP of BrainKing, I guess. And maybe yours doesn't. And for you and all the others a striped down version of BrainKing game pages and main page (like suggested by coan.net) might really be a great idea, to cut down the transfer time. I just don't know if cheeky posts are the fastest way to get it

BTW: If there are too many images for you to load - maybe you could turn smileys off to have fewer? Have you checked your browser settings? Does it have enough memory to cache all images so you don't have to load them again with each request? Because usually an image is only loaded once and then read from the cache instead of over the internet from i.brainking.com, and thus shouldn't slow your page loading time down at all.

Andersp: Due to the disappearance of Action Points, as he explained just two sentences further on. Which makes sense to me...

Andersp: Yeah... And this slowness is applied to the page transfer from BrainKing only to a certain group of users? What do you think why I don't have those issues? Because I am living relatively "close" to Prague and my ISP obviously has a good connection to CZ, or because I am on a mysterious BrainKing white list of people being serverd promplty?

Bernice: If you won't stop repeating the same complaints over and over again - will you at least stop shouting?

Bernice: There is no limit in how many f/s one person can be the little boss. But there is a limit on how many little bosses one f/s can have: only one

Andersp: I don't see him treating people different. At least not based on "computer smartness". Maybe based on how they "ask" their "questions"? The people complaining about his sarcasm are the same that begin every post with blaming Fencer of not doing anything useful about BrainKing. I don't think that

Fencer, do you feel like your time has been wasted when you spend the effort and energy of writing a blog entry only to find that it can't be accessed????

Oh I'm sorry I forgot you were busy adding little incidentals to the site that no-one really knew they needed but it looks like something has been done so it may quiet the masses.

is an appropriate start to ask what's wrong with BrainKing or what to do about it. It is clearly meant to be sarcastic and rude in itself. So what do people expect when they beg for a rude response?

fakar10: OK, it was 600€

redfrog: Yes, it ended a while ago, and the winner stayed anonymous. I don't remember the price exactly, but I think it was something around 700-800€...

gambler104: When I upgraded to a Rook membership, half of my remaining Knight time was added to my Rook. So it would be circa one and a half week - minus the time of processing the order maybe it will be a week.

coan.net: When I switched from Knight to Rook, I became a Rook right away and the rest of my Knight membership was added (one Rook month for two Knight months if I remember that correctly) without me having to ask Fencer for it, so I always thought that it is part of the automatic processing.

But now I am not even sure that my payment was processed automatically

gogul: pardon?

Tigger: I guess it's an effect of the new design and not a selectable feature.

Oceans Apart: If your opponent would be cheating in that way, you'll certainly notice it
I am sure Fencer could go ahead an reverse games in which people would have used it - but that would be a lot of work to do, so it might be better to not frankly tell it on BK board.

HoityToity: No, she is not. She discovered some really severe misbehavior, I just tried it out myself (in an uncounted game).

I don't find it very helpful to come online and see 42 new posts on BrainKing.com board - all making fun of a deleted post. If the original post gets deleted - what's the point in keeping the responses? It just leaves people confused. I think it is a good practice of other discussion board systems to remove a whole thread, not just the root post. Or not to remove it, but to move it to a troll fare - a cemetery for deleted posts.

alanback: Exactly

kaluza: Oops - sorry, in Firefox 2.0 this results in the post having a scrollbar, not the whole page getting wider (at least with the "No fonts" layout). I have removed the example...

alanback: <pre> is a (X)HTML element for pre-formatted text. The text is displayed in fixed-width font, and formatting information such as line feeds and leading spaces or tabs are preserved. So if you write somthing in one line without inserting a line break and put it in inside a <pre> element, it results in on line and doesn't get broken in parts.

joshi tm: But it indeed levels it up a bit.. In a normal game currently the Mancala stats are ca. 60% white, 4% draw and 36% black. In a 1 win match a player who starts with black has ca. 38% chance of winning (if we just look at the white/black advantage, not at player skills of course..), in a 2 wins match ca. 44% and in a 5 wins match it is ca. 47%, which is close to even.

joshi tm: That's not nice ;)
Well, when it comes to unbalanced games like Mancala I'd always prefer 3-wins-matches or something like that, so things get a bit more even. But why not let it be random who's white and who's black?

joshi tm: Might depend on who is black and who is white. Or is the higher rated player always white?

gambler104: I also like the idea of a BrainKing Championship.

MadMonkey: That's why you should always create Single Elimination tournaments as "1 win match" - so in case of a draw, the match is replayed

Would be nice though if "1 win match" was preselected when one attempts to create a SE tournament.

Chaosu: There are only 26 in the dropdown list ;)

Fencer: Thank you :)

nabla: I already started doing that. Not because I liked the old style better, but mainly because I want to read other statements than "I want the old style back" again There has to be made a small change to the site, which I already told to Fencer, and a little more work has to be done by me, but nothing impossible. The state of what has been done so far can be viewed here. Some font sizes aren't correct, and the list-of-games-where-it-is-not-your-turn is in the wrong color and without border. But that will be done in a few days I hope, and then we can get back to business

AbigailII:

Fencer: Not when he's logged in. But the first time he visits the bookmark after opening the browser he isn't logged in and will see the ads. But since this is the case only once or twice a day, he doesn't want to keep an extra bookmark for that.
Anyway, the point is that one sponsor seems to behave really bad, and to even be a potential security issue for BrainKing users, which is somewhat very undesirable.

Fencer: Yes, let them feel the pain they are avoiding

oldhamgirl: go to "Settings" in the left column and remove all three check marks under "Show banner ads"