The meta box is only visible to administrators and can be completely disabled by unchecking one box in plugin settings (“Settings” tab, “Modules” section, “Content Permissions” checkbox). I don’t think it’s so burdensome that it would be necessary to disable it by default. Also, if it were disabled by default, I suspect most users would never even realise that the feature is available.
Thread Starter
Anonymous User
(@anonymized-23173868)
But it is. I now have hundreds of sites where clients have an extra metabox visible on it, adding more clutter to the posts screen and giving them the chance to start playing around with stuff they don’t understand. This should have been an opt-in feature since it’s new, not the default.
Eh, I can see your point, but it’s a trade-off. For some, it’s a new thing added in an update. For others, it’s part of the initial experience when installing the plugin for the first time. If someone else likes the feature, and it’s disabled by default, then they will have to take an additional step to manually enable it on each of their sites.
In general, my policy for this plugin has been that every major new feature starts enabled and available by default. Of course, if there’s a lot of negative feedback about a feature, I may change it so it’s off by default. That, however, would take time (to collect more feedback) and multiple reports from different users.
Thread Starter
Anonymous User
(@anonymized-23173868)
Perhaps checking if it’s a new install when activating the plugin and only enabling the feature if it’s a new install and displaying a one time admin notice otherwise. Again, I now have hundreds of sites with that metabox on all the posts and pages. Very frustrating.
In principle, I could add an optional setting that does something like that, or add a filter that lets you change the default state for new modules with a PHP snippet (so that they’re disabled by default). For anything more, I’d want to wait and see how many more people report this as an issue.
Either way, that wouldn’t really be an improvement in this case because it would still require making changes on a lot of sites.
