Well it has been far too long since the last one of these so with no further ado I give you the mighty Christer!!!!!

1. For those that don't know your story how did Fumbbl come into existence? I first came across Blood Bowl at the University in 1995 (back in the days of 3rd edition and DeathZone?). I quickly ended up making a web-based roster editor to help keeping track of the teams in the league we ran. Around this time, OLBBL opened their gates and I tried to play for a while without really getting into it. The client they used wasn't exactly friendly to use.

Time passed on and I was playing on and off on the tabletop with friends until early 2002 when I found the site now called talkfantasyfootball.org. I lurked there for a while and found the MBBL league and the PBeM system. I decided to try it out since they were using another client which seemed better than the one used by OLBBL. While the client did indeed seem better, I felt that it was a bit too bothersome to be emailing files back and forth and didn't quite like the way games took many days, sometimes up towards two weeks, to finish so I left MBBL.

At the same time, I saw SkiJunkie?'s JavaBBowl being mentioned on talkfantasyfootball. I downloaded it and really liked what I saw. This was completely different than the other clients at the time, and much easier to play through. It wasn't complete in any way, but I clearly saw the potential. I then started to look around for an online league that used the JavaBBowl client but found none. I figured that this was unfortunate since I really liked the client so I ended up talking to some people on the forums and decided to start a league for it (called JLeague). Since I didn't want to update rosters by hand, I ended up writing a utility in Java to manage teams, results and skill rolls (LeagueManager?).

I ran a couple of scheduled leagues and ended up opening up an open play division as well because of high demand. We had 30-40 active players at this time, and it was becoming harder and harder to do all the updates. Note that I was personally responsible for updating teams with results and doing skill rolls for everyone at the time. Given that there was still high demand and that I was already getting overloaded with work, I went to work on creating a web-based system that handled results automatically.

At the end of 2002, I got word of this guy who called himself Mr-Klipp who was also working on the same thing. We ended up pooling our resources and combined our code to get things up and running faster, and FUMBBL opened its doors on January 3rd, 2003.

2. How much work actually goes on behind the scenes? This is a very hard question for me to answer, simply because I don't know exactly how much work is done by everyone on the staff.

I personally spend a fair amount of time on planning and developing new things for the site (on the order of 10-20 hours per week). In addition to that, I try to keep track of everything that goes on and support the other staff members when they need help or if there's something I have to do myself. I also try to keep updated on what's going on in the community and spend time reviewing forums and responding to PMs. In total, I spend around 30-40 hours per week on the site (both on, and offline).

From a purely technical perspective, we are processing and solving around 300 support tickets per month. The #FumbblAdmin? chatroom sees considerably more traffic and most of the issues of the site are handled through there. Overall, I'm estimating the number of issues the staff deals with to reach around 1000 per month. One issue takes anywhere from 5 minutes to several hours of work. Let's say that the average issue takes 5 minutes to handle, making the actual "worktime" along the order of 2-3 hours per day in total. On top of this, there's also a lot of time spent waiting for things to happen and simply paying attention to the chat.

Apart from officer tickets and issues, we have official tournaments and forum and chat moderation.

The tournaments themselves take up a huge amount of time which is reflected by the work of PurpleChest and his group of tournament staff. We have a fairly packed tournament schedule and I can't even begin to imagine how much work they all do. I'm certain that it's many many hours of work every week.

The IRC and forum moderators are also working hard. Keeping up with the endless stream of forum posts and the chatroom may not require a lot of action, but it does require a load of work in just keeping up and reading what people say.

Last but not least, there's a number of people who keep track of things like the help system and player run leagues. These are not anything I can track and I can't really say how much time is spent there.

Overall, there's a pretty staggering amount of work that's being put into the site every day.

3. Do you ever actively recruit for mods/admins or do you wait for someone to volunteer? and is there any criteria that needs to be met? Mostly, staff are actively recruited. In the past, I have made public announcements and asked for volunteers, but lately I've mostly gone directly to certain people asking if they are interested in the position. In fact, I am currently in the process of recruiting some more help to cover certain timezones and language skills.

As for criteria, it varies a bit depending on the "job". For officers, I first and foremost consider personality and how well the person would fit into the team of staff. It's crucial that the staff members are on good terms with each other, as we all must be able to cooperate. Another criteria is often the timezone the person lives in. Since we are a global community, we're always trying to keep the site staffed around the clock and that means we have to consider people from all over the world. Then there are language skills. An absolute requirement is English, which comes down to the cooperation thing again. Any additional languages over that are obviously a bonus, and I'm currently headhunting people with certain language skills right now (although by the time you read this, I will probably have announced the new staff members).

On top of that, I try to find level-headed individuals who can handle the inevitable pressure of being in a staff position. A friendly and helpful attitude is also important.

4. Do you have a preferred playstyle or race? It shouldn't come as a big surprise that I'm a big fan of Khemri (I currently have 9 active Khemri teams). This comes with a fairly bashy playstyle, but I always try to play to win the game at nearly any cost. I find it an interesting challenge to mix a strong bashy race with a strong focus on winning games.

I'm sure people will laugh at me for stating that Khemri are hard to play. I'm not really the best Blood Bowl coach on the site (in fact, I'm probably far from it), and I'm fine with that Smile

5. Kalimar is currently working on a FFB client, how big a pert of the site will this be? Are we looking at a new main competitve division with LRB4 pushed into obscurity or will this run in partnership with the other divisions so that we can make a choice or which ruleset we wish to play? This question comes up alot. The site has always been aimed at keeping to the most recent ruleset possible, and this is probably where we'll go for the main divisions. In the long term, I don't feel that sticking with LRB4 is a good idea since it's going to become harder and harder to even find the rulebook for it.

However, this transition will not happen at the flick of a switch. LRB4 will continue to run on the site for some time to come, and maybe we'll simply end up having a permanent LRB4 division. Most likely, the current R division will become a LRB4 division and we'll be opening up a LRB6 division to be the "main" one. And then we'll migrate over our other divisions as well.

It's quite clear that Kalimar's FFB client will end up being a major part of the site. It's in active development and is supporting the most recent ruleset. JavaBBowl will stay supported in one form or another until the point when there aren't enough games played with it. If people keep playing LRB4, we'll keep supporting it on the site.

The exact way we're going to introduce the FFB client isn't clear at this point. For now, our plan is to do another round of testing under the new codebase and then have an open-play division running. Once that's stable enough, I'll be looking into various ways to expand it.

6. When you are away from the site what do you do to relax? Assuming "relaxing" means not working at my daytime job either, I'm mainly spending time with the family or playing some other game (WoW, or something on the Xbox). I also try to keep up my photography Smile

7. I don't think I've ever seen you play a game, why is this? Lately, I've been spending most of my time on the site with various issues I've had to deal with. Between Kalimar's client, the GW C&D crusade and my recently announced changes for the L division there simply isn't much time for me to play games. I do play every now and again though, but it's fairly rare.

8. If you could trade places with any one person, alive or dead, for one week who would it be and why? I'm quite happy being myself to be honest Smile

9. Does PeteW really have an admin client? Smile "There is no admin client".

10. Any advice for new members to the site? Read the rules of the site carefully, join the chat, play some games in the Academy division. As with any other community, it's often best to stay somewhat quiet to begin with to simply get a feel for it before you join in on the conversation. Pick up the basics by the experienced members and have fun with your teams.

More to follow soon.