seosoldier

Okay, I appreciate the responses, and I admit to my ignorance that WP is an open source project which does change my attitude towards it and the folks who create it.

I also just found out that it was not the minor update that broke the WP theme I spoke of above, but it was the major update to 3.9. I am willing to admit when I am wrong.

That said:
The point is you should ALWAYS give people the OPTION of updating, whether minor or major. If you were to put a pop-up that comes up when someone first starts with a WP site and it said something like “WP will update itself with minor security updates. We highly suggest you allow this because if not you may regret it by having your site hacked. However if you are an expert user and would like to be notified of updates so you can update manually, please un-check this box.”

I think that would cause the vast majority of users to willingly allow auto-updates (minor updates) and would give the expert users the OPTION of checking to see if their themes and plug ins will still work with the minor update, before updating all of their WP sites.

For that matter I would also like to see the OPTION to roll back to the last update in the case that something DOES break. It would give one time to contact the vendor of the plug-in or theme and get it ready for the new update, before updating back to the newest version.

I can’t stress how much giving the end user the OPTION to update is important to establish user appreciation, loyalty, and general happiness with your “product” or service. If you took a poll of people who have more than 3 WP sites I’m sure you would find that most agree with me.

WP says that these minor updates don’t cause problems but just today I was reading on a theme forum for a theme I build most of my sites with, that the newest update BROKE some important functions of his theme. This is not some fly by night theme creator but a real business. The theme creator WILL fix it, yes, but the point is we should be given the CHOICE to update automatically or not, NOT be forced to do it.

If you guys want to end up like AT&T keep not caring, and keep forcing crap down our throats and you’ll get beat out by the first great new platform that comes along because people will be ready and willing to JUMP to a new platform that gives people CHOICE. For example I HATE the way Google forces updates and all kinds of intrusive stuff on me and I jumped over to outlook mail.

By the way you did not answer my question:
Who is a person in charge of customer retention or something similar that we can write an official complaint to regarding this issue?

Why do you insist on people starting a new thread around the SAME issue? Doesn’t it make more sense to have everything regarding the same issue in one thread so people like me who are searching for info on this auto-update problem can find it in one place??

Hi, thank you for the replies!
Rachel, I am not sure but I believe I changed the Permalinks to display Title instead of dates. Would that cause these 404 errors?! If so (or if not) is there a way to clean them up?

Krishna, I can understand that links are created but then why are the links now 404’s? And most importantly is there a way to avoid getting these 404’s? I do not want 404’s associated with my web site so if WordPress randomly creates 404’s I will need to detach it from my web site.

I really don’t get why WordPress would create 404’s. Is this a common thing? Is there a way to avoid it? And once created how do I clean them up?

Thanks again for the replies!