Milmud Editor’s Report 2020 [Admin]

This is the Milmud Editor’s Report 2020 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 2020

Personally I’ve had an interesting year, having planned and run a major exercise for a potential no deal EU Exit in October, and then moved onto heading a political change team looking at scenarios for the outcomes of the UK General Election, which actually took me until late February to handle the reshuffle too. After that I managed to end up in hospital for a few days at the beginning of the covid spike in March. We all had an interesting year from then.

Video server

Following Dave Boundy’s example I experimented by adding a jitsi video server to our web presence. This ran for a couple of months before I deleted it. I’d mistakenly thought we were only charged when it was up, but that wasn’t the case, and the amount of use we made didn’t justify having a dedicated instance in addition to Dave’s. I’m not passing any of that on to CLWG, other than in lieu of my membership fee.

Articles by members

Only 7 members wrote an article for milmud that was posted to the website. Between them they wrote 13 articles.

1. Brian Cameron (4)
2. Nick Luft (2)
3. Andy Grainger (2)
4. Peter Merritt (2)
5. Andrew Hadley
6. Jaap Boender
7. James Kemp

Taken together this year’s articles generated 1/6 of our web traffic, although a third was to the homepage which shows the latest ten articles, so they’ll have been read more than the stats suggest.

Milmud more popular than ever!

Last year I reported that Milmud had it’s best year on the web. Well despite everything that’s been going on we had a 50% uplift in traffic, despite fewer posts overall.

According to the wordpress stats Milmud has had 3,061 hits to the 3rd October against 2,029 for the previous twelve months.

We also had our best ever day in May 2019, but a day in May 2020 topped that with 29 more views to hit 101. (We normally get about 5-20 per day).

A golden chestnut (photo: James Kemp)

Most Read on Milmud

Excluding the home page, Programme and About CLWG pages, the five most read posts on Milmud in 2019-20 were

1. Tabletop Wargames – How to Write Rules for Toy Soldier Games [Book Review] Jim Wallman (2016) – 94 views
2. The Battle of Midtskogen, 1940 Nick Luft (2019-20) – 82 views
3. Island Fortress 3 – the invasion Andrew Hadley (2019-20) – 76 views
4. Megagame design debate Jim Wallman (2017) – 57 views
5. After the Battle of Towton, 1461 Nick Luft (2019-20), 57 views

Editor’s Article of the Year

My favourite post as Editor was Brian’s one on Yes Prime Minister, we could send a gunboat.. It’s about a subject and a session I wish I’d attended. Also it exemplifies the core of CLWG in that Brian looks at why something didn’t work, critically, and suggests a load of ideas on how it might be made to work. As a civil servant involved in briefing Ministers (and I’ve recently done several briefings for Cabinet Committees and 1:1s with the PM for my Secretary of State) I’m intrigued by the premise.

Golden Chestnut

I’m following my usual policy of awarding the Golden Chestnut based on quantity and quality. This year Brian Cameron is the stand out winner, because he wrote the most new articles, and the one I enjoyed most.