So I am enjoying the idea behind
Milfords: ULTIMATE FC Pickers Challenge. I even started to do it... but the scope of doing all those games while cutting and pasting team names took a lot of time and I had to shelve it on account of being busy. When I came back to it enough games had already been played that it didn't seem worth it, and it made me wish there was a better way.

So here is my wishlist of stuff that I would love to see regarding major tournaments (but could also be used for leagues and such perhaps).

1) GUI match tipping. You know how there is that little link to the match report next to a pair of teams that appears after they have played their game? What if there was a pair of check marks floating next to every team name for teams that have yet to play their games, and you could click one to pick that team as your favored winner. Then this data could be stored and accessed via the FUMBBL API by some brave souls for their own nefarious purposes. Then something like Milford's challenge would be darn near easy to do even on a large scale. I'm sure that league folks would enjoy tipping winners in playoff games and such too.

2) An IRC bot (or addition to nuffle) that sat in #FumbblMajors and chirped at everyone in the channel whenever a major game was starting up. Even cooler would be to link this idea to the above idea so that it would ping you whenever a game you tipped was starting, so that you could check games of interest and get notified whenever they were starting, but let's not get too crazy with these pipe dreams! ;)

3) Thumbs up for match replays. As a spectator, how many times have you watched an incredible game and wanted to show your everlasting approval for such an entertaining time? Often, you say? Well what if you could "like" match replays (and/or match reports) and have the number of likes displayed in the match report. Then the most recent "hot" games could even be featured off to the side somewhere on the site.

4) Related to this, what about spectator comments after the fact like on blogs? I'd suggest that comments on match reports by any coach should be allowed in response to any tournament game that a coach has written a match report for. If neither coach files a match report then the game can slip into obscurity, but if it's worth writing up (and most tournament games are worth writing SOMETHING about!) then the specs could add their bucket of loose change and crushed peanuts to the comment section. Maybe there are some issues with this one, but I think on the whole the value to the community of folks who want to say how awesome or crazy a particular game was will outweigh the occasional lizvis troll comment.

Disclaimer: I know this is just some silly musings, yadda yadda, real work done by real people should be focused on other stuff, etc.

There is another FC game on now, so I guess the blog is over. Kthxbye!

P.S. Preview mode for blogs would be great! Long live FUMBBL! Go Morg!