In Edge Rails, callbacks won’t stop if you return false, you need to throw :abort . This prevents really subtle bugs where a method in a callback returns false, unintentionally breaking the callback chain. For example, the following would previously have halted the callback chain:

def unset_admin
  self.admin = false
end

Check out the pull request on Rails to see the discussion around this feature.

Note: This feature is currently slated be included as part of the Rails 5 release.