Hey, @paulstenning!
I’m Zach, the current product lead for Ninja Forms. I’m the one who personally makes the call about when to ship updates to Ninja Forms.
At a minimum, you will see an update to Ninja Forms 2x per month. We are constantly looking to improve, and making improvements to Ninja Forms for our 1,000,000+ users, and most of them wouldn’t have it any other way.
This month, we released more updates than usual. This is a direct result of contact from the WordPress.com team asking us to make some changes for their VIP platform. There were many changes made, but one change in particular caused a problem for users with help text. If you didn’t use help text, you were not impacted by this issue.
For a very small number of users, though, their forms ceased to render. I made the call to release an off-step release to get those users back up and running. Two days later, we made one more tweak to that release to fix another fringe use case related to help text in the form output.
None of the changes made would cause your site to 500 and/or leave it in maintenance mode, and we have had no such reports from other users.
Can we do better testing? Of course we can! Inevitably, though, bugs will make it into production, especially in an unpredictable, “wild west” environment like WordPress. I, and most of our users, are proud that we have a team that no only updates frequently, but responds quickly to those bugs when they’re introduced into the product.
For you, this is a concern/complaint. It’s valid, and I understand your argument. For most of our users, though, the fact that we’re not afraid to push an update for our impacted users is a huge plus and lets them know that the product is not only updated often, but that we truly care about improving the experience of our users.
Thank you for your feedback. If you have any more questions, or still believe Ninja Forms is causing your site to 500, please feel free to reach out to us here: https://ninjaforms.com/contact/ and we’ll walk you through troubleshooting your site.
