Milmud Editor’s Report 2021 [Admin]

This is the Milmud Editor’s Report 2021, unfortunately I wasn’t able to prepare it in time for the CLWG Business Meeting.

Editor’s Report 2021

Personally I’ve not actually managed to attend more than one CLWG session, and the only report I’ve written is this one, which was late. However on a work front I’ve helped to set up a new major transformation project, been promoted and have a posting to Glasgow, which sort of explains the lack of gaming and writing!

With a year of online only for the most part we’ve had a major uptick in traffic and content generation.

Articles by members

Eleven members wrote an article for milmud that was posted to the website, four more than last year. Between them they wrote 30 articles, and that doesn’t count the published and then deleted post. So almost twice as many writers, and nearly three times as many articles written.

Peter Merritt (6)
Nick Luft (5)
Brian Cameron (4)
Deborah Southwell (3)
Jim Wallman (3)
Mukul Patel (2)
Terry Martin (2)
Jaap Boender
Joe Robinson
John Bassett
Jonathan Pickles

Taken together this year’s articles generated 27% of our web traffic, although over half of all traffic was to the homepage which shows the latest ten articles, so they’ll all 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, for the second year running. In 2021 we had a further 50% uplift in traffic, with more of the hits looking at more recent posts than in the previous years.

According to the wordpress stats Milmud has had 4,697 hits to the 3rd October against 3,061 for the previous twelve months (and around 2,000 for the previous year).

Our best ever day for hits was the day that last year’s report was published, topping the previous best ever in May 2020 by over 50 hits more, to get 157. (We normally get about 5-20 per day on average, although the last two Octobers have got to almost 30 per day on average).

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 2020-21 were all published this year. They were:

Seize Warsaw: Onside Review – Nick Luft – 100 views
Online Interactive Maps (Part 1) – by Nick Luft – 79 views
EMU Wars: Onside Review – Deborah Southwell – 78 views
Exploring female roles in wargames/ megagames/ roleplaying – Deborah Southwell – 74 views
STONK ONLINE – OPERATION BINGO V – Jim Wallman – 61 views

Taking into account the views of previous year’s material, then Nick Luft was the most viewed, followed by Jim Wallman and Peter Merritt. Brian Cameron wasn’t far behind at 218, with Deborah Southwell at 199.

Editor’s Article of the Year

My favourite post as Editor was Peter Merritt’s one on Numbers, Perceptions and War… The Importance of How Units *Think* They Are Doing vs Reality. I find the psychology of why things happen fascinating, and it was interesting to see how Peter approached this. I also wonder if this isn’t the core of how we ought to game some of the higher level bits, lots of current social media commentary on recent wars seems to have a disconnect between the experiences and perceptions of people involved and what some of the more objective observers might perceive. Although, to slightly misquote a senior officer, it’s probably too early to tell if any of the recent wars succeeded or failed…

Golden Chestnut

I’m following my usual policy of awarding the Golden Chestnut based on quantity and quality. This year Peter Merritt wrote more articles than anyone else, including the one I liked most as editor, and he also contributed 1/6th of the views from this year’s articles.