I am sorry you feel this way. I am a single developer who’s been working on this completely free plugin for 15 years. While many other have gone freemium or premium, I have stayed completely free for all this time because I don’t want the expectation that charging for a plugin brings in terms of reliability and support. Free plugins in the WordPress repository are not sponsored by WordPress.com / Automattic or any other organization. They are volunteer-driven projects.
I barely have the time required to add features to this plugin, but I still do. Developing plugins is something I do in my spare time, on top of working a full-time job, typically in my evenings, taking me away from my wife and family.
Considering the number of options that Link Library offers, testing more thoroughly would take hours and hours that I don’t have to give. If a larger percentage of my user base sent donations, perhaps I could be more inclined to bring this to a more professional level and spend additional time on this, maybe even hire a testing to help out with the project. WordPress shows that there are more than 10,000 sites running this plugin, yet I probably only see small donations from 0.02% to 0.05% of these sites, typically after I’ve implemented a new feature for them or helped them figure out how to achieve a specific link page display look with the plugin. They rarely come out of the blue just because they like my plugin.
All this being said, I do try my best to think about what a code change might impact, and I do some testing before releasing updates, but I can’t always get every update right. WordPress is a complex platform with a lot of hooks and filters that do a myriad of things and a single person can’t know them all. Link Library is a complex plugin that has grown in a multitude of directions over the years with thousands and thousands of lines of code.
If you want less frequent updates, check out the Global Options page of Link Library, when you will see that two different update channels can be selected, Standard or Monthly. The Monthly channel changes the WordPress update mechanism so that you only get notified when a x.x release comes out for Link Library. These are typically more stable releases than the x.x.x versions.
If this is still unacceptable to you, there are more than 60,000 plugins out there in the free WP repository, so there must be a few that allow you to render pages of links. Alternatively, have a look at Envato and other plugin markets that offers paid professional plugins.
