As a creator, I have mixed feelings about auto-updates. I have uploaded many, many of my pages in advance (through until September). I do stick around to interact with readers, though, and it's convenient for all the reasons already listed (holidays, internet connection problems etc).

However, as Shades is a relatively unknown comic, it's also frustrating that auto-updates are front-paged at a time of the day when very few readers are online and that it has slipped out of the "updated comics" box by the time they are. When my current uploads are exhausted, I'm seriously considering abandoning the auto-updates so that I can update at a time when readers are actually online.

As a reader, because of the above problem, I no longer refer to the "updated comics" box, so the auto-update question is now irrelevant. Instead I use the search function to see which comics have updated during the current day. That obviously gives far more comprehensive results.