When to make a feature hidden

When creating a Feature that contains a Feature receiver performing certain tasks that require special permissions, consider making it a hidden Feature, thereby requiring activation via STSADM.EXE. Why? When a Feature is activated from the browser interface, the code is executed within the context of the configured identity of the application pool hosting the Web application containing the site collection. This identity may not have the necessary permissions, such as writing to the file system. However, when a Feature is activated using STSADM.EXE, the identity of the user performing the command is used, who may have more permissions than the application pool’s identity.