In reply to Miroslav Glavić.

I agree with you. Thing is, I remember the bad old days – been with WordPress since 1.2. Pretty much every install of 1.2 or 1.5 was hacked cos of a security issue, even mine (thankfully they didn’t get admin, only into a contributor level so couldn’t do much damage).

I have been surprised how WordPress upto now has kept things stable. But the communication on this was terrible, all they needed to do was put a message into the shortcode or admin to tell people it was disabled, I wasted hours thinking it was something else.

Even as a zero-day, they should have waited and tested or come up with an alternative rather than just take the functionality out. That was like the old days.

But given plugins, themes and WP auto-update has lead to a much more secure system, so hacks are not unknown but rare. So although I understand people disabling the auto-functions – fine if you do check your site every day – I’d urge caution against doing that. Otherwise hackers will be emboldened again.

At very least make sure you have something like Wordfence installed, a firewall to stop attacks! But staying up to date is still the best option.

And I was quoted on articles about this farrago, so I was affected too, and had to find workarounds. It was badly managed yes, but I’d not throw the baby out of the bathwater.