Thank you so much for the responses! In fact I did try filing a bug report to the org-html-slideshow developers, but the project is no longer under active development and I never heard back. 

Fortunately, I was able to convince a friend who's a ClojureScript expert to take a look. He forked the org-html-slideshow project and updated the code to be compatible with the new org-mode export, as well as adding a bunch of extra features like a play/pause keystroke for HTML5 videos and YouTube videos. 

So if anyone's interested in HTML presentations, a new and improved version of org-html-slideshow that's compatible with org-mode 9.x is available at:
https://github.com/aiba/org-html-slideshow.

Thanks everyone! 



On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 2:55 AM, Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> wrote:
Hello,

Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com> writes:

> Peter Salazar <cycleofsong@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I figured out that the problem I've been having with
>> org-html-slideshow
>> (https://github.com/relevance/org-html-slideshow) is that it relies
>> on the old-style numbered anchors that org-mode used to generate for
>> div ID's in HTML export—the ones that looked like "sec-1-2".
>>
>> Example:
>>
>> <div id="outline-container-sec-1-2" class="outline-3">
>> <div class="outline-text-3" id="text-1-2">
>>
>> As you know, the new 8.x org-mode HTML exporter generates this instead:
>>
>>  <div id="outline-container-org42e1e05" class="outline-3">
>>  <div class="outline-text-3" id="text-org42e1e05">
>>
>> This output confuses org-html-slideshow, preventing it from
>> correctly advancing the slides in the presenter view. 
>>
>> Does anyone know how can I direct org-mode 8.x to generate div tags
>> with the old-style numbered anchors like it used to?
>
> The LaTeX exporter *does* have such a capability, through the
> variable org-latex-prefer-user-labels,

Not exactly. The variable above allows overriding the default naming
scheme whenever the user provides additional information. However,
AFAIU, the OP wants to alter the default scheme, without any user
interaction.

This is not possible. I suggest to report it as a bug to
org-html-slideshow developers so they can update it.


Regards,

--
Nicolas Goaziou