no responsibility for the outcomes?

Hi there,

I appreciate you taking the time to reach out with your concerns. I’d like to take some time myself and explain why you see those disclaimers and the value and purpose behind WP Rollback. Of course it’s your prerogative to install it or use it or not either way, but just for the record.

THE SHORT VERSION

This is not beta software, it’s battle tested and been helping over 200K users for the past 8 years. We take responsibility for the functionality our plugin offers, and make it freely available for anyone to use, and we even donate our time to respond to free support requests; but we can’t take responsibility for every plugin on www.ads-software.com and what those plugins or themes will or won’t do to your website when you roll them back to a previous version.

THE LONG VERSION

What does this plugin do?

All www.ads-software.com plugins are stored on the www.ads-software.com server and can be downloaded and installed through a system called “SVN“. When and update to a plugin or theme is available to you, www.ads-software.com pings your website to say “Version X.X.X” is available for you to download. When you click “update” you then authorize all those files in your website to be updated based on a version number stored on the SVN repo. For example, you could even try rolling back our plugin to version 1.6, you can see all our history of versions here:

https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/wp-rollback/tags/

The default behavior in WordPress currently is that once you’ve updated a plugin/theme, you can’t roll it back from within the admin. If you have a problem with a plugin/theme update, you can’t easily reverse that update. The only way you can do that is to manually go that that plugins SVN repository and find the previous version and download it via command line or some other SVN tool, because there is no way to download a ZIP of an old version from the SVN repo.

So this plugin makes that manual process something you can do within the interface of WordPress itself – you don’t have to know how to navigate SVN or anything like that.

What this Plugin Doesn’t Do

We cannot know or predict or determine what rolling back any of your plugins/themes will do. Because of that reality we try to educate our users on proper WordPress site maintenance practices, like having daily full-site and database backups and knowing how to restore your site. WP Rollback is not a fullsite backup or database backup tool – it only allows you to rollback (or forward) a plugin/theme version which you could normally do manually when/if needed, but with WP Rollback you can do that directly in the interface

How WP Rollback can help you and your site stay safe

We made WP Rollback because there are too many instances where a plugin/theme update causes breakage to a website, and most WP users don’t know how to access older versions of their plugin.

You can scan all our 5-star reviews and see people saying things like “Lifesaver” or “{X} plugin broke my site, but WP Rollback helped me restore it”. That’s because they didn’t have any other practical options to roll back those plugin/theme updates.

Since we launched WP Rollback, several important improvements to WordPress core have happened

1. Restore mode – if a plugin update (or rollback) breaks your site, you can now still access the admin and deactivate that plugin to restore functionality to your website. This wasn’t available when we first launched WP Rollback
2. Theme/Plugin Update by ZIP – If a plugin/theme update breaks your site and you reach out to the plugin/theme author and they provide you with an older version of the plugin/theme as a ZIP file, you can now simply use the “Add Plugin”/”Add Theme” functionality to update to that older version of the plugin. This is great in those circumstances, but often free plugin/theme authors aren’t super responsive to requests like this, so again you’d have to navigate SVN yourself to get that old ZIP

Again, WP Rollback is not a site backup solution, nor a database backup solution. We highly recommend that all WordPress users have effective and easy ways to have daily backups and know how to restore their sites. This is just part of owning a WordPress website.

Lastly, WP Rollback is free code licensed under GPL. This means you have rights as a user of this free code, but also responsibilities. When you install any plugin/theme from www.ads-software.com on your website, you become the owner of that code, it belongs to you and it your responsibility.

We stand behind the purpose and functionality of WP Rollback, as do the 200K+ active users, and the 180+ 5-star reviews.

I’m happy to answer any other questions you might have, and wish you a solid and stable and successful WordPress experience.

hi @webdevmattcrom

thank you for your reply which I wasn’t expecting, and the explanation of how this works and doesn’t works.

I appreciate that the plugin is free and I don’t question many of your positive reviews. My question is – how many of those 200k+ users have experienced a fatal error, white screen or otherwise total website crash in the process of rolling back a plugin using WP Rollback?

None of the plugin developers knows how other (unknown) plugins on the user’s WP installation will behave in relation to their plugin, whether there will be a conflict or not. Sometimes there is. Yet I haven’t seen a similar disclaimer in any plugin’s installation process warning of a possible fatal error and rejecting any liability for it.

That’s why it is highly recommended – speaking of the user’s responsibility – to have a staging site for testing new WP versions, themes and plugins.

Regardless; while I absolutely agree that a WP Rollback plugin can be a lifesaver, it can also be detrimental (by your own admission) to the website’s health and (well)being.

Now – if a plugin issue/crash happened on the staging site, the rollback can also be performed there, as the risk is calculated. But when all the action takes place on the production site – that’s a different story.

Today, I wanted to update my Woocommerce (WC) plugin. I do have a staging site and so updated it over there. Tested the front end – no problems.

So with full confidence, I then updated my WC plugin on my live production site. The update went fine, I refreshed the cache and then checked on the front end – which is just a habit, as the new version was already tested on the staging site.

Regardless of that positive staging test, when I added one product to cart just to go through the purchase process – I got a DATABASE ERROR! message and the transaction was stopped. With growing anxiety, I tried few more times – same error message. THIS SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED and that’s an issue for the WC plugin developers.

So what do I do? I’m not a developer, don’t have a webmaster on call, so I quickly clicked on the Rollback link – and then saw your disclaimer.

Now I had two options: leave my website with a non functional store until I can get some help from the WC support – which would be the next day at the earliest due to the time difference (I’m in Australia), OR proceed with rolling back the plugin to the previous version with a high risk of a fatal error which would take my entire website off the grid for the same, or longer, amount of time.

I did a full site backup just in case, but was not game to risk my entire website down with the rollback. After several minutes the WC database has somehow fixed itself.

I will take a calculated risk only when I am well prepared for the worst case scenario and so any impact would be minimal and short lived, which was not the situation in this case.

Your disclaimer has added insult to injury, hence my feedback.

I haven’t actually deleted your plugin. I’ll keep it but will use it only when I’m prepared to take the risk of any of the potential outcomes listed in your disclaimer.

Thanks again for your reply.

Anna

Thanks for your follow-up and your understanding. With your feedback in mind, I’ll take another look at the wording. The potential for fatal errors aren’t because of WP Rollback specifically, but the process in general of rolling back plugin versions, it’s just what’s at stake in WP sometimes. But it’s possible we leaned too heavily on the fear of fatal errors and should instead instill confidence and have our tone be more educational rather than warning/fear based.

Thanks for the open dialogue and I truly wish you success.

It’s good that this led to feedback we can take and update the wording. It’s been ages since we’ve looked at that. I actually started a rewrite of WP Rollback in React and did a wording pass but didn’t actually ever finish the redevelopment. This could be a good opportunity to push that past the finish line.

that’s the outcome I was hoping for, thank you.