In reply to David Anderson.

You make good points, David. When I brought up this plugin, I didn’t necessarily intend to single it out as the sole offender. It just happened to be the one that caused me problems personally with a site breaking.

To me, the broader question is how do we as users want plugin/theme authors to handle automatic updates? Is it acceptable to turn them on without notice? Should WordPress encourage or even allow this practice?

And honestly I’m fine with WordPress core doing this in most cases. I’d trust them to do no harm – even though there is always a risk.

With plugins or themes, anyone can push one out and there are varying degrees of quality. So now we are having to trust not just the core team, but other developers as well. I think a line needs to be drawn here between what core and plugins/themes can do.