France Bloodbowl: 2150 coach, 7000 teams, 17500 games played

[France Bloodbowl] ZeBoss · Tue May 13, 2003 2:18 am

If you want to play online against French coach this is the place to go.

Visit France Bloodbowl

We have more than 2150 coach, 7000 teams and from the first october 2002 till today we have played approximately 17500 games.

If you are still not convinced we are currently in the process of translating the website in English. So soon, you won't have any reason not to come.

Last, but not least, for those of you who wants to begin to play even if the interface is in French, the process is really easy.
1) Create an account (Inscription)
2) Create a team (Création d'une équipe)
3) Find an opponent, there is a forum for that and there is approximately 50-150 games played everydays most of them played through Javabowl (but there is also a pbem league and lots of localized league everywhere in france : Paris, Rouen, lille, Lyon, etc)

If you need more informations don't hesitate to ask!

Mestari · Post by **Mestari** » Tue May 13, 2003 7:41 am

So, FUMBBL isn't the only large BB playing internet community that there is. I wonder what is the total count of coaches playing BB over the internet by some means?

A nice-looking website, btw, although I have to admit that my french skills are quite limited.

Longshot · Post by **Longshot** » Tue May 13, 2003 8:39 am

FUMBBLE, OLBBL and FBB are 3 big online site!

TiMuN · Post by **TiMuN** » Tue May 13, 2003 9:02 am

Well .. i must say that's impressive .. and i don't know how you manage that huge databases ..

We had to cut inscriptions off due to server problems, and due to the league beign unmanageable.

The Liga NetBowl features 245 teams currently active (more than 800 created), 2001 matches played (and the database lost many of them), and more than 80 unique coaches (Can't find data on that).

We play with Eje's tool, the NetBowl .. based on Visual Basic, which can write and read html Cockerel sheets, display player images, writes a final report of the match, has diferent colour for the diferent positions on a team, ... but is open to use diferent rules or house rules.

http://ludere.ual.es/netbowl

[France Bloodbowl] ZeBoss · Tue May 13, 2003 12:32 pm

I have programmed all the website using PHP/MySQL.

Using all the previous experience of our league in Paris with about 100 coach and about 1500-2000 face to face games. At this time, I was using a self made program through Access, Word and Excel. With the internet I decided to put everything online to see if it interests someone.

I have been the first surprised by the success. We began the first of October 2002 and we have finished the first season at the end of December with about 300 coach. Now we are in a rythm of 5-10 new coach inscriptions and about 100 games by day.
As the server wasn't prepared to handdle such a traffic we have had to change it two times.

We began on a basic shared hosting, enough for the 2 first month. We then have migrated to a shared semi dedicated server, on where we stay for 2 more month and now we bought a trully dedicated server where there is only us!

For the moment I have to managed all the technical problem by my own and I have had to delegate a lot of responsabilities to the group of league commissionners (approximately 10-15 people) who can do almost everything on the website. Like : publishing new texts, managing the forum (add, edit, delete), managing the homepage, validating the games played and the game sheet typed by the coaches.
Our only problem is the cheaters and how time consuming this website is!!!
For the first I'm working on a tool to find them, for the 2nd I can only sleep less!

If you want more precision, I can give you them so don't hesitate to ask.

And also if you have a big league, we can provide a dedicated server for your application?

Grumbledook · Post by **Grumbledook** » Tue May 13, 2003 12:37 pm

This would explain the lack of french coaches in fumbbl then ;]

Site looks nice but i can't read or speak any french!

[France Bloodbowl] ZeBoss · Tue May 13, 2003 12:46 pm

So you won't have any reason not to come!

Longshot · Post by **Longshot** » Wed May 14, 2003 5:43 am

Grumble hates French since he met me....

Redfang · Post by **Redfang** » Wed May 14, 2003 8:46 am

And who can blame him...

R

Longshot · Post by **Longshot** » Wed May 14, 2003 11:29 am

christer · Post by **christer** » Sun May 18, 2003 5:08 pm

[France Bloodbowl] ZeBoss wrote:I have programmed all the website using PHP/MySQL.

Same as FUMBBL.

[France Bloodbowl] ZeBoss wrote: I have been the first surprised by the success. We began the first of October 2002 and we have finished the first season at the end of December with about 300 coach. Now we are in a rythm of 5-10 new coach inscriptions and about 100 games by day.
As the server wasn't prepared to handdle such a traffic we have had to change it two times.

FUMBBL has about 200 coaches playing 300 matches every day now. Since the start on January 3rd this year, people have played about 23500 games in total.

This is all running split up on two machines:
Apache runs on a P200 with 96M RAM.
MySQL runs shared on my "own desktop" which is an Athlon 500 with 256M RAM of which MySQL takes about half.

We had a really troublesome time for a while but I have been working on optimizing things heavily in the last month or so. Here's a brief list of things that you might want to try to improve performance:

- Install a PHP Accelerator.
This lowers the CPU utilization of apache _alot_. However, it does make it use up slightly more RAM but it's a very nice tradeoff.

- Enable the MySQL query cache.
This was disabled on my installation by default. I have mine set at 5M (set-variable=query_cache_size=5M in your config file) which is more than enough for my purposes.

The previous two are very easy to do and doesn't require any change to the code which is nice and easy

- Optimize your queries.
This is what does the most to performance but it's also hardest to do. During my optimizations, I found that I had queries running that took up to 30 seconds on full CPU time..

If you want pointers on how to optimize, drop me a mail (christer @ fumbbl.com) and I'll try to help.

[France Bloodbowl] ZeBoss wrote: Our only problem is the cheaters and how time consuming this website is!!!
For the first I'm working on a tool to find them, for the 2nd I can only sleep less!
If you want more precision, I can give you them so don't hesitate to ask.

Indeed. Cheating detection and prevention is a problem. Maybe we could cooperate on ways to detect it?

-- Christer

TiMuN · Post by **TiMuN** » Mon May 19, 2003 9:58 am

christer wrote:Cheating detection and prevention is a problem. Maybe we could cooperate on ways to detect it?

Count me in, guys ... always willing to learn some more.
We decided to go the hard way, so coded all the ability and ageing rolling, so the web handles them, and then offers the player on a personal area, options to chose skills and retire players, and stuff.

Grumbledook · Post by **Grumbledook** » Mon May 19, 2003 12:43 pm

Yer thats how fumbbl does stuff

l_dauguet · Post by **l_dauguet** » Wed May 21, 2003 10:12 pm

Yeah but the problem with cheaters is in the way they report the actions. A serious injury often becomes a light one. Not talking about players'deaths...And also some coaches makes agreements. I let you score, give me an injury and all that crap!

And i'm sure that some coaches create multiple accounts to play against themselves!!!

Makes me feel like taking my machine gun!

ZeBoss is a nice guy, a bit shy though

but a hard worker. I realised that after seeing all the work it takes to do that.

Grumbledook · Post by **Grumbledook** » Wed May 21, 2003 11:40 pm

the injurys they can't change

luckily most cheaters are stupid and easily spotted

Talk Fantasy Football

France Bloodbowl: 2150 coach, 7000 teams, 17500 games played

France Bloodbowl: 2150 coach, 7000 teams, 17500 games played

We have bought a dedicated server

English version will be there in less than one Month

Re: We have bought a dedicated server