Hi, I'm Christer.

I'm the owner and main developer of FUMBBL, and continually do my best to keep it up to date and adding new features. I work as a software architect/designer/developer for a company that specializes in data integration, reporting, analytics and data warehousing primarily in the financial industry.

FUMBBL History
I have been playing Blood Bowl since I first got introduced to it at University back in 1995. I quickly ended up running the local tabletop leagues and developed a very simple web based system to manage the teams and pairings for the league. After the local tabletop league fizzled out, I turned to the Internet to try to find somewhere to play games and found the OLBBL, which at the time was the major online Blood Bowl community. Their client (bbirc) was very limited and needed a lot of manual work to use, and OLBBL had a fairly extensive set of house rules to adhere to in addition to various "this is how we play" community expectations (I still remember being expected to reroll injury rolls that killed an opponent player). After a while of trying to get used to it, I decided that this wasn't an environment for me, and I stopped playing online Blood Bowl for a few years.

In the first half of 2002, I came across talkbloodbowl.com (TBB, now talkfantasyfootball.com or TFF) and my interest in playing online ignited again. I joined a league using Ronald Loker's PBeM client, which very quickly ended up not being for me. The work with emailing save files back and forth combined with having to suffer through a game going badly over the course of two weeks wasn't for me, so I stopped playing that way as well.

Then I found JavaBBowl, a new Java based real-time client written by someone calling themselves SkiJunkie. This client was something completely different than the other things I had tried, and to me looked incredibly promising. However, there were no online leagues I could find using this, partly because it was very new, and wasn't fully complete.

So, to actually give this client a shot, I decided to start a league of my own intending to use this client, finding others to join me through the TBB forums. A league was set up and we ran a couple of seasons with a handful of players. I built a tool called LeagueManager which I used to track teams, do skill rolls (centralized to avoid people making "mistakes") and providing JavaBBowl the rosters in a format it expected.

Over the course of these seasons, more and more people showed interest in joining, and people wanted to play outside of the structured scheduled league. So I figured this wasn't too hard to implement support for in my tool and did so. Very quickly, a relatively large number of people joined in, and I ended up spending a lot of time (multiple hours every day) on processing results (they were emailed to me for inclusion into the tool). At this point, I started working on a web-based version of the LeagueManager tool as I saw that the manual processing simply wasn't sustainable.

Then at some point, a minor disaster struck and I lost the savefile for the LeagueManager application at a point where my backup was about a week old. To get back to the correct state, I would have to process all the result files for the last week or so again which would be quite a big set of work (30-40 hours maybe) and instead of doing that I announced that we would be putting the league on hold and I would instead spend those hours on the new web based system to get it into a functional state.

This was around December 2002 and at the time of me putting more work into the web-based system, I got word that someone calling themselves Mr-Klipp wanted to talk to me about him also having started to work on a similar web-based league tool. We got in touch with each-other and ended up pooling our resources and cooperate on getting one site up and running. About a month later (January 3rd, 2003), the FUMBBL website moved out of the test phase and we've been online ever since then.