We put a lot of effort into our demos and are planning to continue with this practice but we’ve seen a few new themes with really big front-end bugs (invisible navigation, horrible spacing, unreadable text etc) right there on the home page so they are really sticking out.
Our questions is - do reviewers really look at demos of themes? We would argue that this is very important because that’s what the potential buyer sees.
Unfortunately, the quality of the submissions has decreased lately, it seems that they approve everything now, no matter the quality, and this bothers me a lot, because the exposure for the first page of the category is awful. With so many themes approved, in maximum one week your item goes to the second page, and the sales are fewer and fewer.
If an item looks broken to you let the author know about it, if he doesn’t agree with you or you feel that the item is truly broken and the author doesn’t want to reply or take action please notify Envato Support and your ticket will be assigned to a reviewer of that specific category that will take your information into account and if necessary disable or soft disable the item until the item is remedied.
Thanks, we want the reviewers to notice these things (even when we, the authors miss them) because then they make our product even better and the overall quality of the themes and the whole market better.
Of course, but these things may break in time due to updates and improper maintenance and server care, and these things may also be reported by authors. I recommend contacting the author directly and only then sending a message to support. Most authors are keen to have their items in tip top shape! Cheers!
Hey thanks for posting this message It prompted me to go through and check our demos.
We use multisite and sometimes a plugin update will wreck the live demo of another site without us noticing.
I’ve fixed up a few of our live demos and will fix the rest up shortly
I’ve also started moving our live demos into an “admin demo” tool here so users can test all the features and even see how installing the theme works: http://dtbaker2.theme-demo.net/
If you’re spotting a bug on the item you can always report it to Envato Support. Items must work as advertised in the description and the demo or you are entitled to a refund and the item in question will be disabled. Cheers!