RoboCommish: the OpenSource FFL Manager

04MAR02 Update: Moved to new webhost, updated links, closed out 2001

Gridiron Grumblings

Latest Release:
RoboCommish-0.3

Most open source projects start with a specific itch that needs scratching. In the case of beleagured Fantasy Football Commissioners everywhere, there's enough itching to support a field of Poison Ivy. For the benefit of newbie commissioners, here's just a highlight of the headaches to look forward to:

Weekly Stats compiling -- every player in your furshlugginer league
Team Maintenance -- who started what player, who's trading who, who's picking up who
Game Scoring -- You've got player stats, you've got team rosters, you've got scoring rules. Do the math.
Weekly reporting -- players get testy when they don't see their rankings bright and early on Monday morning, then updated on Tuesday

In the dark, old days this was done by hand on Monday morning with graph paper and the day-after box scores. Then came the Web and spreadsheets. Now there are many commercial software packages that can help the commish manage his league, and even a few that download stats automatically. There's also web sites that handle league logistics and scoring, either for a fee or a pound of privacy. I don't know of any that are free, as in beer or speech.

More to the point, I don't know of any closed-source packages that are sufficiently configurable in rulesets and reports to possibly satisfy any league that enjoys haggling and rule tweaking as much as mine.

RoboCommish is a suite of PERL tools to automate as much as computationally possible, freeing up the commish for the far more important task of lording victories over league-mates. Because of my own experience with ever-morphing rule sets and report requirements, it is designed to be configurable to the Nth degree. (I mean, its open source, so that's pretty much a given, right?) Since it's been years since I've been able to limit myself to one league, RoboCommish is designed to support an arbitrary number of different leagues simultaneously. And since I'm lazy as heck, it's designed to farm game data from the net and spit out html and/or text reports from a single UNIX/Linux command line. (In deference to our GUI and Windows friends, there is also a GUI front-end, albeit immature.)

SKY BOX

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