We’ve had complaints that the read-a-random-Straight-Dope-column button (upper left corner of the Straight Dope home page) wasn’t working right - it cycled through a mere 10 or so columns rather than the entire repertoire of 3k+. The tech geniuses here believe they’ve fixed this bug and invite you to test it. Please report any continuing problems below. Thanks.
I want to know who the first Doper is who actually cycles through all 3k+ of them, just to be sure… 
I tried it. Got about 20 Staff Reports in a row – and no columns – before it started repeating.
There’s over 3300 columns on the site, hopefully we can get a better mix here.
Definitely don’t hire these guys to program the SDMB online casino until they develop a better understanding of the word random.
The feature is only returning staff reports and only from a very specific point in time. (1400-1600 based on the way the columns are numbered) e.g.
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1400/ through https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1599/
The front page seems to always point to 851. Then that page always points to 474, which points to 910, and so on.
It seems that “random article” means the same article for every page. (I do not see what Crazyhorse is seeing, as the numbers do seem to jump around a lot. But only if I follow the random link on the next article.)
Seeing as the name part of the URL is apparently optional, it would seem to make more sense to me to just implement a basic JavaScript randomizing function. The only additional data needed would be the current number of articles, which could be parsed by reading through the front page.
Why is this in ATMB? It does not really bear on the SDMB so much as (Comments on) Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports.
Okay, just tried it again. Got over 30 random columns from truly random times, no pattern that I could see for dates, nice mix of columns and staff reports. And no repeats.
(Though I’m sure it repeats at SOME point … )
Hoping for more reports from the field before this is marked as solved. But looking better.
I had a similar experience to TubaDiva: I saw articles dating from the 1970s thru 2017, both staff reports and regular columns. I clicked 25 or 30 times and saw no repeats.
Thanks, Bo! Read up, everybody!
Spent a while clicking through with entertaining stops to read some. Looks random to me with a wide range of columns and staff reports returned from the 70s to the present. The tech guys did good!