In reply to Peter Cralen (@PeterCralen).

Why not? What makes you think adding a setting and giving people the option of an informed choice about THEIR website would lead to less updates? By having this feature it will draw attention to the fact that web based software needs to updated for security and help people consider how THEY want to manage that process. It could actually improve update rates by helping educate the user base. The large number of old versions isn't because loads of people have opted out of automatic updates, it because they don't how important it is to update - it's about education.

There seems to be a presumption (in software generally), that updates are always good and the latest version of anything is automatically the most secure. This is a fallacy. Whist, in theory, existing features should become more secure as issues are found and fixed, as more features get added (which is the main purpose of most plugin updates) the potential for vulnerabilities increase.

No small business wants to be the guinea-pig testing new versions of software. That's why there's a lag with switching to the latest version of Windows that comes out (other issues aside).

Maybe a 'Delayed Automatic Update' option would help in this, e.g a setting to automatically update, say, 1 week after the release, provided no patches been released since then.