It looks like there was a major bug in the handling of the "sidebar" (which is the menu upon the left side of the screen) for the past few months.

Users who had selected "View previous headlines" in their site options were still not seeing them.

This was caused by a typo - I used two variables in my code "$show_prev_headlines" and "$show_old_headlines". I was using the wrong one when it came to displaying things ..

I've fixed this bug now, and the sidebar test case has been updated to make sure that this doesn't break again in the future.

Fun huh?

I'll try to cause fewer bugs in the future so I don't have to publically shame myself here .. but in the meantime there was an interesting question posted to Slashdot the other day On-line Communities - Ads or no Ads? Interesting to see differing viewpoints.

(I posted a couple of replies.)

To finish with more site-news I've updated the article submission process, thanks to a suggestion from Chris. Now authors who submit articles can populate their new submission with a set of initial tags.

Hopefully this will mean that there are no articles posted to the front-page without a tag or two. Of course you're still welcome to add your own tags to articles ..