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An Ethical Dilemma for WordPress Plugin Developers
I recently discovered that a popular WordPress plugin had enabled automatic updates without explicitly informing users. How did I find out? I received emails from each site where the plugin was installed informing me that an update had been completed.
But it gets better. Over a holiday break, a colleague asked me to look at a website that wasn’t loading properly. I turned on debugging to find that – you guessed it – this particular plugin was the culprit. The automatic update failed, and some key files were missing. Thankfully, manually uploading a fresh copy of the code fixed the issue.
The incident got me thinking about the ethics behind this move. Not just with a specific plugin author, but all WordPress theme and plugin developers as a whole. So, I reached out to others on the Advanced...