auto-updates for this plugin should be under site admin control

Hi @pbiron , Thanks for your suggestion. I appreciate this. But I have a specific reason for that and WordPress has hook to do so. So I thought its nothing wrong and nowhere in WordPress guidelines I found that it is prohibited. Did I miss something? Or is it creating any issue? If this is the case, feel free to share and I will be happy to fix it.

I don’t believe that the WP Plugin Directory Guidelines prohibit a plugin from “forcing” itself to be auto-updated. I just think it is bad practice to take that choice away from the site admin/owner.

I can understand plugin authors wanting to make sure that site admins/owners are always using the latest version of their plugins…but that decision should really be in their control (and ultimately, it is…since they can always define the AUTOMATIC_UPDATER_DISABLED constant to true and then no auto-updates will happen, and there are several other means to disable auto-updates across the board).

If you want to encourage site admins/owners to auto-update your plugin I think the better means would be to add your plugin to the auto_update_plugins option (which is what the Auto-Update UI does). But if you go that route, be sure you don’t corrupt the value of that option…as doing so would interfere with all of the other conscious choices the site admins/owners have about whether to auto-update other plugins.

If you don’t mind my asking: why do you want to force your plugin to be auto-updated?

Thanks for your detail explanation. I agree on everything you say. But its really a very simple plugin. It is not like the user experience will change in updates or breaking changes will come. I am aware of all these. I did that so that I can quickly fix any silly issue (if any) of the plugin before users experience the issue and it served my purpose a few times. Also, no users complained about anything broken after update etc. On the other hand, user impression has improved a lot. So I think it is a good feature of WordPress. But surely I agree with you and I will remove this when I think I will be introducing new features with lots of changes in the plugin etc and users must be aware of the upcoming changes before they update manually.

@mehbubrashid Just wanted to add a +1 to this request. I do not want updates to any plugin on most of my client sites, as we handle plugin updates, along with security issues, in-house, as part of a client package. This is why WP made this optional, and plugins like Gravity Form allow you to turn this off.

I understand. Thanks to both of you for your opinions. I will turn auto update off in the next update.