PF 2024 od Admina

Dear Readers, Fellow Moderators, Friends,

The year 2024 is already impatiently padding past the door, surely wondering how it will roast us again. So far, pretty much every year in recent memory has succeeded to the top.

The wars in the world have not diminished, on the contrary, conflicts around the world are multiplying, so every year, unfortunately, the content and work for those of us trying to monitor military-historical events increases, and there is little energy left for that history at the moment, as the present fully occupies us, whether in Ukraine, or Israel, or elsewhere in the world. The military industry has come alive, and new and new weapons are being developed, right down to directly operated by soldiers on the battlefield, or remotely controlled unmanned/unmanned versions of them. Destruction and killing are ubiquitous in the media space as well, and we often post photos of destroyed places and cities where only a few years ago we could move freely and admire the local beauty. It's a sad job in many ways.

Our site has entered its second quarter-century of official existence, and all year I've been looking not only a little bit into the future, where I'd like to take our site and its functionality, but also into the past. I remember colleagues who have left us forever, I rejoice in colleagues who have in turn joined us, and sometimes I hope to see again "old friends" whom time has taken somewhere and I don't even know how, where or why we lost touch. Technically, we have had a year of significant changes, because after those 20 years or so of formatting with BB code from the original PHPBB platform, we switched to pure HTML and WYSIWYG editor (similar to Word, for example). I'm trying to lower the barrier for writing text and creating themes, which are activities we can't do without, and we can't expect newbies to want to navigate code and tags. It's been a laborious transition and not entirely painless, as we're working with 20 years of posting history, almost 750,000 posts, and the variability is truly enormous, but I hope that over the Christmas holidays we've managed to identify and resolve the main issues.

So 2024 is a year of further adding information and developing content, putting more pieces into a huge puzzle, along with taking advantage of new features and, most importantly, gradually translating into English. I haven't translated any new posts for a number of months, so while this time last year I was rejoicing that we were somewhere around 150,000 untranslated posts, this year that number will be higher, but on the other hand, the new site makes it much easier for more or less anyone to translate the text, so I hope that the English version will become a natural part of every post submitted. We are trying to reach out to the billion English-speaking people who are partly looking for information published by us, and partly who can participate in its development and addition.

I will be glad if you will keep us in your favour in 2024, if you will join our activities, if you will come to sit and talk at one of our meetings, and if you will keep a healthy interest in history, which is often the key to the future.

I thank all my fellow authors and moderators for the time and diligence they devote to our common hobby and wish you all the best of luck, health and well-being in the new year 2024.

Yours
Radek Havelka
HM Admin v.r.

I'll add the top 20 most read articles for 2023

Aero, Dr.Kabes, Prague - Vysočany	874968
Where did the names of Russian and Soviet weapons come from	714413
Avia, a.s. for aeronautical industry, Prague - Čakovice	30098
Turkish military campaigns on the territory of present-day Slovakia I.	24935
Napoleon's most important battles	14050
Ranks Table	13243
The Mashin Brothers - Facts	13234
Losses in World War I	12740
Waffen SS Muslim Divisions	12164
Last Battle of the Austro-Hungarian Army (Vittorio Veneto 1918)	11096
The Myth of the Halting Effect	10014
Bushido - Samurai Moral Code	9871
Current Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa: 2. Conflict analysis	9592
The stopping power of short firearms for the second time, part 1. - The Greatest Myths of Early Ballistics	9288
Marking of German Vehicles and Tanks in the Period 1939-1945	8995
The Battle of Saratoga, 1777	8929
T-34 Tank of Heroes!	8726
1453 - Fall of Constantinople, The Demise of the Byzantine Empire (1)	8653
T-62 - First Time in Combat	8527
Beginning of the Use of Battle Gases on the Western Front 1. World War	8442

And the 20 articles with the most "claps" / likes (counts for the entire history of the article)

Bombing Balloons Fu-Go

B-36 - Bomber at the Crossroads

Lovci Stucco

T-34 Tank Heroes!

His Majesty's Two Deck Fighter Battles

The Avro Manchester's operational deployment during the war

TU-95

Admiral Graf Spee - Corsair in the South Seas

Bell (P-400) Airacobra Mk.I

Battle of Makin Atoll (landings and ground operations)

Liberatory for Chinese battlefield

Battle of the Coral Sea - I.Part I

The Beginnings of Air Navigation and Flying in Japan

Summer 1943 - Defeat of the Wolf Packs

Battle of Stalingrad

Curtiss Hawk H75 in the French Air Force (December 1938 - June 1940)

IL-2I heavy fighter

The sinking of the Z-union

The Battle of the Coral Sea - II.Episode

I./ZG 2 over Poland

And finally, an overview of the most active colleagues for 2023

New posts - 31.411

1.	RoBoT	5200	16.55%
2.	Panzer	4002	12.74%
3.	Janko PALIGA	3970	12.64%
4.	Jirka Cooper	2709	8.62%
5.	seh1	1830	5.83%
6.	Gebirgsjäger	1717	5.47%
7.	Admin	1713	5.45%
8.	wade	1364	4.34%
9.	Standa	1259	4.01%
10.	janko	1189	3.79%

In terms of statistics, unfortunately I'm struggling with the change at Google and its forced deployment of Google Analytics 4 in mid-2023, which is worse, all the more complex and provides almost none of the useful information we used to. The numbers in the new system, which definitely includes data sampling, are sometimes flying from wall to wall and I'm going to change in the near future as Google has stopped being useful and conversely many countries in Europe are struggling with its interpretation of GDPR so it's no longer meaningful to us.

Overall we have a definite drop in users this year, although in absolute numbers it's still an impressive 1,434,236 visitors for the whole of 2023 with an average visit time of 2m 56s which is an increase of almost half a minute on last year. We have 6,627,863 page views. Our website alone from its main server (not counting distribution CDN servers around the world) contributed more than 16,000 GB of data to Internet traffic for 2023.

Všetkým prajem všetko najlepšie v novom roku 2024.

Páni dovolím sa pridat k zelaniu vsetkeho dobreho do noveho roku, aby sa darilo sukromne ako aj profesne. Novy rok nevypada ze konfliktov ubudne prave bohuzial naopak, takze bude hodne prace, tak zelam aj hodne sil a trpezlivosti na nasej "novej" valke.

Vlasto

Všetko dobré v roku 2024.

Přeji mnoho štastných a veselých dní v roce 2024.

Pohodu a šťastie v tomto roku prajem všetkým!