WordPress Has Responded to Rogue Plugin Updates

by WarriorForum.com Administrator
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A new article on Social Media Today reports that WordPress just issued a reminder to plugin publishers not to over-reach their authority. The company says that violators will continue to get flagged.



WordPress.org just issued a statement aimed at plugin developers, reminding them to respect user decisions with regard to automatic updates or expect sanctions.

While we do look for plugins that touch the update services on submission, we do not monitor existing plugins, which is where this reminder stems from. Unless your plugin has the purpose of managing updates, you must not change the defaults of WordPress' update settings.

You may offer a feature to auto-update, but it has to honor the core settings. This means if someone has set their site to "Never update any of my plugins or themes" you are not to change those for them unless they opt-in and request it.

The reason for this is that plugins should not over-reach their authority. When a plugin is made, it is self-defined by the developers as what it will do and why. There are some logical reasons to expand that of course (an anti-spam comment plugin may grow to also handle feedback forms), but for most plugins, the arbitrary management of plugin updates is outside their stated goals.

Plugins crossing over purposes, overriding settings that are unrelated to the function of their specific goal, can and will cause unexpected outcomes. It also destroys the faith users have in you to not break their sites. Sadly, this happened recently to a well used plugin, and the fallout has been pretty bad.

We do understand that many plugins want to take advantage of the new features within WordPress. But if your plugin is a custom block, you really don't have a need to be changing how the uploader works, or even setting your plugin to default-auto-update. At this time, we have no plans to spell this out in a guideline. We do currently, regularly flag plugins that go outside their dictated (self defined) boundaries, and this is not a change. Please, respect your users.

The statement notes there are no plans to issue formal guideline about this issue, but it does say that WordPress won't stop "flagging" plugins that violate user trust. You can find the statement right here.
#plugin #responded #rogue #updates #wordpress
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