If so, it could be that you were notified once when the original post was made, and again when it was edited. That's not supposed to happen, so well look into it.

When I followed up and clicked in the Home page on The Left Column title (default DU4 white text "The Left Column" on blue rectangle highlights yellow), the page devoted to The Left Column also showed the article duplicated, but the page has a completely different title: DU Morning Digest.

For a long time in both cases of The Left Column / DU Morning Digest, the article was simultaneously at the top and also about six or seven excerpts down. Both instances were identified with the same poster LetMyPeopleVote.

They are not there now, not accessible that way because it seems to only show a single day with no archive or previous links.

I do not know the mechanism for The Left Column. From a hint I presume it is a daily selection made by you and/or elad. Perhaps you each selected it, or one double selected it.

The only difference between the two instances was that one included the media source " (Washington Post) ". Both instances had the same URL with same trailing post code number. I'm guessing the selection process has some options leading to the slight difference.

"DU Morning Digest" is a special page for people who are subscribed to DU's push notifications. I try to send out a notification most weekday mornings with a link to that page. On DU3, we did not have any links going to that page.

However, the Morning Digest is simply the same list of threads which go into the "Left Column" on the homepage. When creating the DU4 homepage we decided to link the Morning Digest from the Left Column header, since there wasn't another obvious place to link that header to. However, the fact that they have different names is really quite confusing. I'm thinking about changing the titles of both the "Left Column" and the "DU Morning Digest" to "Featured Stories" to avoid further confusion.

The reason why you saw the same story twice is that on weekday mornings I manually curate the "Left Column" items, but in the evening (and on weekends) they are auto-populated. When that happens, the most-replied to LBN threads from the last couple of hours are inserted at the top of the section.

Most of the time this doesn't cause a problem, but if I manually add an item later in the day, and if that item is an LBN thread, then there's a chance that the item will be duplicated if it is one of the auto-populated threads later on. That rarely happens, but it must have happened yesterday. It would also explain why the text below the headline was slightly different -- the earlier one was manually formatted, the later one was auto-formatted.

Thanks for the background.

Many many years ago on a previous home page redesign I recall we were sitting around trying to think of a name for that section -- it ended up being about as simple, "What are we going to name this column of left-leaning news stories that appears on the left side of the page? Wait, I've got it!"

While I have a soft spot for the title, there are some good reasons for renaming the section on DU4, especially since we now have additional action going on in the "left column" of the site as opposed to the "Left Column" (hence my initial confusion over notifications).

I changed the last digit of today's DU Morning Digest URL (that The Left Column links with) to '4' for yesterday

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=digest&date=20231024

Now I don't see either instance there the way I did yesterday, and the articles don't seem to fit my memory though on this point it is so vague I can't vouch for the other articles.

Is The Left Column / DU Morning Digest updated more than once a day?

Should the DU Morning Digest / The Left Column have one single title or are they separate entities with different processes and content sometimes?

It is essentially a mirror of the items in the "Left Column" on the home page. It will show whatever is in that section. Once a day, a new version of the page is generated to reflect that day's news, so you can see the version for a particular date using the URL:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=digest&date=xxxxxxxx

...where "xxxxxxxx" is the date in this format, using October 25 2023 as an example: 20231025

This page was created for people who receive push notifications from DU -- I often link directly to it in morning notifications, so that people can get a quick view of the morning's featured home page stories.

But I'm definitely considering changing the name now that the page is linked from the header on the DU4 homepage. Currently the plan is to re-title both the old "Left Column" home page section, and the "DU Morning Digest" page to "Featured Stories"

which can be found here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=update

We usually send notifications linking to this page on Saturday and Sunday, it just shows a snapshot of what's happening at DU at the moment you click on the page. There's only one version of this page, there are no archived pages like the Morning Digest.