Can you give me an example of what you think might fail? There are unit tests for open_ended and notes usages in test_course_settings.py:test_advanced_components_munge_tabs. Should that test be expanded?

I'm not sure why 'tabs' needs to be special cased compared to any other advanced setting. My change no longer explicitly filters it out, so any JSON request should be able to update the value. All that the 'filter_tabs' option did was to remove it from the filtered list, but since it isn't in there anyway, the old behavior just threw an exception. Are you thinking that we should add 'tabs' back into the filtered list instead in the case where filter_tabs is not true.

I'll investigate the behavior more carefully, but any more details as to what you see as the problems would be very helpful. Thanks.