How do I prevent Academus from persisting a user's selection of default tab?

Academus 1.5.14, 2.0.8 and 2.1, unlike prior releases of Academus, persist a user's choice of selected tab in a broader range of cases when saving preferences than did prior releases. Some Academus deployers may regard this as a feature. If you do, you need do nothing and can continue to enjoy this feature of these releases. However, if you do not desire this feature, it can be removed.

To remove this feature, remove all occurrences of "&uP_sparam=lastSessionTabID&lastSessionTabID={$focusedTabID}" from the preferences.xsl file in the academusTheme. This is generally located at $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/portal/WEB-INF/classes/net/unicon/portal/layout/AL_TabColumn/academusTheme/preferences.xsl.

That change will restore Academus to its prior behavior around persisting layout preferences. It will still be possible for end users to persist selection of alternate tabs as the default landing tab that they see upon login.

If you'd like to go further and instruct Academus to in all cases not persist preferences about selected tab, the following SQL update will remove the involved parameters from the definition of what parameters make up a user's "structure transform preferences".

DELETE FROM up_ss_struct_par WHERE param_name="activeTab";
DELETE FROM up_ss_struct_par WHERE param_name="lastSessionTabId";

You will need to restart your Academus instance for the change to take effect.

All the normal caveats around backing up Academus files and databases before changing them apply.