I get people’s apprehensions towards the automatic update feature coming in WordPress 3.7. Developers tend to be pretty skittish about turning over control of any part of their site to someone else.
In the comments on this piece at WP Tavern, Nacin does a fantastic job breaking down why these calls for opting out of the updates by default are short sighted. I’d quote the whole comment here, if I could, but it’s a fairly long one. Instead, here’s a few key points.
If the next version of WordPress comes with a feature that the majority of users immediately want to turn off, or think they’ll never use, then we’ve blown it. To take it further: Any time you add a feature that defaults to off, why bother?
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We can be really smart about this, like not doing auto updates when it doesn’t make sense to — such as when we can detect we are a Git clone or SVN checkout, or when updates are blocked from the UI, or when the web user isn’t the owner of core files. But I fail to see why, given the technological ability of pushing the button for you for security releases, we’d get almost all the way there then just add a checkbox. That’s a cop-out.
Fuck yeah, man.
While it’s rare for me to encourage people to go read the comments anywhere, you should really do that in this case. Especially if you started to form even a minor opinion about this feature.