It was fun while it lasted

Another post on posting, sorry! It's that danged anthropological bent in me.

The mystery becomes a little clearer. The updating scroll of over a thousand wargaming blogs over at blogs of war has changed its settings, and is now a static list (presumably in order of being joined to it with the most recent additions to the list at the top, as Adelaide Gamer is in the top fifty or so). This appears to be an action designed to wind back the 'acceleration' of traffic measurements being driven from the site. I wonder if it was the site's authors, or blogger admin, that brought about the change.

Much of the recent increase in traffic to Adelaide Gamer was steered here from Blogs of War. The fact that I had commenced more frequent posting would have explains why. It seems that there is a 'systemic resonance' on the web whereby some traffic generates more, so the new traffic brought more. The 'reverse resonance', of course, might also be true, which would explain the marked decline of hits when, firstly, blogger (or someone) disabled the count of visits from Blogs of War - or, if not, disabled counts from blogger scrolls generally - which would be really sad), and then reverting the scroll to a static list ordered by date of addition to the list.

I raise the possibility of the disabling of counted traffic from the blogger scroll function at blogs of war because, even when the scroll was still functioning (for a few hours after I posted the previous post earlier this morning) there was none of the usual 'spike' in numbers. As I know there were a fair few people watching their stats (like me) over recent days and eager to talk about it, this was unusual to say the least.

So, the 'distortion' is being taken out of the numbers.

But, at the same time, the insight provided by the dynamic view of the active gaming blogging community which was the blogs of war scroll, has been denied us. Unless, of course, there is a system update happening. Which I doubt.

It is still a great list, mind you, and a treasure to be troved, but one whose use has been changed from hub to historian.

It was fun while it lasted!

PS The other big change with blogs of war is that if you now click on a blog's name, it takes you to a 'formatless' version of the most recent post, with the blog's own template and dressings pared away. One actually has to click on the post to be taken to the actual blog. So it is now a much more restrictive environment for those of us who were getting the hang of surfing the wargamer's blogosphere.

PPS I added a couple more blogs to my own blog scroll:

Udder's Well - a documentary history of active ongoing D&D campaign sessions, and
Jim's Wargaming Workbench - with among other things a concentration on weird / alternate games, particularly a fascinating looking campaign set in Edwardian Age transcaucasian regions.

PPPS Update about 10 hours later - Blogs of War has now come back to 'normal', with its scrolling update including snippets of the most recent post. This, of course, puts my theory back into its place about the reduction in posts. Maybe no one likes me anymore?

I forgot that I also added these two to the blog roll:
Wall Advantage - ASL (Advanced Squad Leader)
A Wargaming Miscellany - Involved in imagi-nations, SCW and ancients, and a cool writing style.