I sympathize (and do not understand the downvotes at all): there are valid reasons why a user of the site may want to browse it without logging in from a particular (e.g., possibly infected) computer. Not being able to access the familiar features of the site in this manner can be frustrating.
The most obvious workaround would be to append ?tab=hot
, ?tab=week
, or ?tab=month
to the URL, or have these bookmarked somehow. However, I just tried it from Incognito window and for anonymous users all three show the Month
tab. This looks like a bug. I could not find any way to access Hot
or Week
lists without logging in.
The recent change of the interface for non-logged-in users appears to be done in haste; e.g., it is responsible for the recent (temporary) disappearance of meta/chat/faq links. Someone already pointed out that non-logged-in users now don't see blog posts.
All that said, this decision wasn't made at meta.MSE and it's not going to be reversed at meta.MSE. (Since your post is about a network-wide interface change, http://meta.stackoverflow.com would be the right place for it.) But I hope that at least the bug with malfunctioning ?tab=hot
and ?tab=week
URLs can be brought to the SE developers' attention.
Added. I noticed that on StackOverflow the hot/week/month tabs are still shown to non-logged-in users. Some SE sites are more equal than others. This goes against the idea of having consistent interface across SE sites.
mobile
in the footer of the site. The mobile version has not been redesigned (yet?), so it allows the same options active|featured|hot|week|month as the desktop version used to have. $\endgroup$ – ˈjuː.zɚ79365 May 26 '13 at 0:40