MilMud Editor’s Report 2023-24

As well as being the 50^th year of CLWG existing, it is also the tenth year that MilMud has existed in the form of a wordpress blog. As with other aspect of the club there’s been a little less posted or viewed in the last twelve months.

Milmud Stats for 2023-24

Only ten members posted an article for MilMud, half of them made one post (including one new member), and the remainder mostly did two each, apart from Jim Wallman who managed five (although three of those were within 18 minutes of each other on the Sunday morning at the conference). As patterns go this is not surprising, but there ought to have been more contributions because every member is expected to write at least one milmud article every year.

Contributors

The following CLWG members contributed articles: Adam Carpenter, Jim, Nick Luft, Andrew Hadley, Andy Grainger, Deborah Southwell, Nick Drage, Peter Merritt, Terry Martin, and me.

Milmud’s Top Ten New Articles of 2023-24

These are the top viewed articles that were written in the last year, excluding info pages and the home page (which was the most viewed page overall). Older articles were excluded too.

	Article	Author	Views
1	Water Water Everywhere – game design session	Nick Drage	355
2	The Bastard Comes Design session – the race for the Crown	Andrew Hadley	289
3	Bombing of Darwin Day (19 February)	Deborah Southwell	229
4	A Line Between Disorder & Order	Jim Wallman	194
5	September 2024 Meeting – Welcome to Serconea	Adam Carpenter	113
6	“Birds of Prey, Hitler’s Luftwaffe, Ordinary Soldiers and the Holocaust in Poland” ibidem Verlag, Stuttgart 2021.	Andy Grainger	97
7	Artificial Incompetence	Peter Merritt	82
8	Deeply Unhistorical – but maybe in a good way	Andy Grainger	80
9	Can you game serious subjects today?	Terry Martin	79
10	Thai-Sho on Deck – Game by Evan D’Alessandro	Nick Luft	73

Golden Chestnut 2024

Here are the top four contributors and their posts & views.

Author	new posts	Author hits	hits/post	rank
Deborah Southwell	2	497	14	1
Jim Wallman	5	443	23	2
Andrew Hadley	1	360	40	3
Nick Drage	1	355	355	4

Deborah Southwell wins

So the Golden Chestnut goes to Deborah Southwell, again! She holds the record of the highest number of posts contributed since we moved to a blog (see below). So its a well deserved Golden Chestnut for Deborah.

Oldies but Goodies

I find it sort of interesting that as well as the 18 new posts this year, there are about ten times the number of older posts viewed, and that about 85% of our content is still being looked at, even if only by one person. The chart below shows the number of articles by author and year of first publication that were viewed in the last twelve months.

There are two very notable contributors. One is Deborah, who has consistently written since she joined CLWG in 2020. The other is Nick Luft who is the only member to have posted every year since the start of the MilMud blog.

Can you win in 2025?

If you want the Golden Chestnut 2025 then you need to contribute articles. So please, put finger to keyboard and start writing. We need your articles.