I did warn him that people might complain about side effects

Edit: believe it or not, we got more complaints about this. Some people picked their top color specifically to go nicely with the orange Y! So I've reverted this change, except for the Christmas case. Users who have set their topcolor don't see the Christmas top bar anyhow, so don't have to worry.

is it possible that NetNewsWire (possibly other rss readers as well) don't show the favicon for https://news.ycombinator.com/rss anymore because of this change? I noticed this a few days ago

HN is still serving the orange Y for favicons. Only the Y to the left of "Hacker News" in the top bar now has a transparent background.

However, there was a brief period where we were serving the transparent Y for favicons before I noticed that and corrected it; I wonder if the transparent Y somehow got into a cache? Is there a way to force-refresh?

Unfortunately the issue still persists and it doesn't seem to be related to caching.

I think the problem might be that NetNewsWire doesn't support SVG favicons (/y18.svg) and that /favicon.ico isn't available as a fallback. Were there any changes regarding these files recently?

There were! That would likely be the issue then.

What do I need to do to make /favicon.ico available as a fallback?

https://news.ycombinator.com/favicon.ico would need to return the favicon instead of 404 Not Found

I've put it back. Does it work now?

Yes, it's working again. Thank you!

I use [bgcolor='#ff6600'] as a CSS selector for the <td> wrapping the header to remove the header bar color.

So this really did break my workflow, hah

That’s pretty amusing. Does switching the CSS selector to td[bgcolor] do the trick?