Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group

Milmud Editor’s Report 2019 [admin]

Golden Chestnut

This is the Milmud Editor’s Report 2019 for the CLWG Business Meeting. I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to attend the meeting, but I’ll be with you in spirit if not.

Editor’s Report 2019

Restructuring Milmud as CLWG’s website

As directed at the previous business meeting the website has been collapsed into the Milmud domain, I’ve also fixed some of the hosting issues.

As one might expect, the most popular page (after the home page) was the programme (201 views). This was moved to Milmud after the conference last year, bringing all the CLWG info together onto https://milmud.cwlg.org/ (and variations on www.clwg.org or www.clwg.org.uk all forward to that address, making it easier to find us even if there are older URLs being used, either as bookmarks or links). In addition to the programme the constitution has also been copied over and is linked from the top banner along with the programme and details of how to write for Milmud. Thanks to Nick Luft for making that happen.

Milmud more popular than ever!

According to the wordpress stats Milmud has been even more popular in 2019 than in 2018, with 2,029 hits to the 3rd October against 1,409 for the whole of 2018. It has also gone up from an average of 2.49 views per visitor to 2.89, meaning that people who find it tend to load more pages.

We also had our best ever day in May 2019, with 72 views (we normally get about 5-20 per day). The audience is pretty international too, although you can see where we draw members from!

Golden Chestnut

A golden chestnut (photo: James Kemp)

UK                 1,370 views
USA                  395
Netherlands      81
Sweden              67
China                  56
Australia            32
Italy                    27
Canada              26
Hong Kong       19
Ireland              18

Most Read on Milmud

Excluding the home page, Programme and About CLWG pages, the most read post on Milmud in 2018-19 was Megagame Design Debate – a new way of designing megagames written by Jim Wallman in August 2017. This was closely followed by Andrew Hadley‘s Towards a Megagame Taxonomy from June 2016. The most read of the new posts this year was Nick Luft’s Each generation gets the games they deserve.

My favourite post as Editor was Nick’s one on CLWG aphorisms that he’s started to compile from the discussions we have. I recognised many of them, and I suspect most CLWG members will too. We might even have been heard to utter some of them. Sometimes more than once!

Milmud Articles by Author

Since the Conference in 2018 there have been 23 articles published on Milmud (before this one) from nine different authors. The most prolific were Peter Merritt and Nick Luft who both published 5 articles. You can see the rest of the stats below

2019 stats

Table with the 2018-19 posts on Milmud by author, and their views to 3 Oct. The views are shown both for the new posts written in 2018-19 and also for all posts written by that author that were viewed in 2018-19. Only views in the 365 days to 3rd October 2019 are counted. NB not all of those with posts on Milmud are active members of CLWG.
Author2018-19
Post Count
Views for
new posts
Total views
in 2018-19
2019 Posts
Nick Luft5176248Each Generation...
CLWG Aphorisms
Shameless...
Adventures with Twine
More plastic cheese
Peter Merritt5103140American Civil War Megagame [offside]
Jubilation T Cawnpone’s Art of War (and Survival)
Balkan Wars OpSys
Too Good For Children?
CLWG 2018 Conference #4
James Kemp358108Logistics and Strategy win...
Destructive and Formidable
Nine Years War Strategic
Jim Wallman257241Battle of Britain – 1970 Style
School Of Danger
Brian Cameron254792019 CLWG Games Weekend
The Relief of Fort Stalwart
Andrew Hadley250180Island Fortress 1
Island Fortress 2
Joe Robinson13434Bright Lights, Greek Cities
Mukul Patel12652Offside Report on Barwick Green
Jaap Boender1140Onside report: Back in the Fold
Becky Ladley-Jones0025No posts published in 2019
Marc Seutter0016No posts published in 2019
Bernie Ganley0014No posts published in 2019
Jonathan Pickles0013No posts published in 2019
Ixmal Supermarine008No posts published in 2019
Bruce Walton007No posts published in 2019
Ben Moores006No posts published in 2019
Terry Martin002No posts published in 2019

Golden Chestnut

Last year the Golden Chestnut went to Nick Luft. He was again the most prolific contributor to Milmud this year. However the position was shared with Peter Merrit, so I am arbitrarily awarding the Golden Chestnut for milmud contributions to Pete. I think he deserves it.

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Posts: 24
4 Comments
  1. Nick Luft

    Hi James,

    I know for many years we have called the award for best article the Golden Chestnut, but Simon Shakewell* has requested I point out that we should really call it the “Golden Conker”. After all a Chestnut could be confused with the edible nut of the Sweet Chestnut, rather than the inedible but highly entertaining nut of the Horse Chestnut (or Spanish Chestnut), otherwise known as a conker.

    * Simon finds blogging a bit too modern, it reminds him of that awful introduction of 15mm minatures. A step too far.

    • I can see the accuracy as a point constructive criticism intended to foster the development of improving quality. It’s what CLWG is all about.

      On the other hand sometimes we need to make things easy to reduce complexity. Gold is also inedible, so whether it is a chestnut or a conker it isn’t going to become edible.

      Also it’s a virtual concept.

  2. Nick Luft

    Simon has corrected me, and I apologise.

    The introduction of 15mm was not a “step too far” but a “scale too small… to paint the line regiments’ facings on.”

  3. Pingback: Milmud Editor's Report 2020 [Admin] - Military Muddling

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