If you haven’t already heard, we’re on a mission to improve the review experience for you, our authors. Over the past 12 months we’ve been scaling up our team to better serve you, improving our processes to ensure fair and consistent review outcomes, and have been increasing our review capacity as quickly as we can.
Hack Fort is Envato’s biannual event where most teams across the company (except our reviewers and support staff), can work on projects of their choosing. In Quality, we like to use it as an opportunity to work on projects that we’ve planned on doing for a long time but haven’t had the capacity for, or weren’t our highest priority just yet. This time around we chose to tackle the review feedback emails that are sent out when we review your submissions.
Beginning today, the review feedback emails you receive from Quality will be beautifully formatted and will provide you with suggestions for relevant resources. While it’s a relatively minor change, upholding high standards is a core part of our DNA, and we believe that the plain text emails weren’t up to standard.
Finally, it’s no secret that the review queue wait times on some marketplaces have been creeping up over the last few of months. We want to assure you that our reviewers are working as quickly as they can to get through your content. We are growing our team as fast as we can while ensuring we maintain our quality standards and are building new tools that will increase our review capabilities and performance. Aligned with this, another project we tackled this Hack Fort was a tool that helps our ThemeForest reviewers more easily identify changes between submissions, a challenging task for items involving code. This is yet another important step in the right direction.
Thank you for your continued patience as we work to improve the review experience for you.
I’ve had the “pleasure” to receive one such e-mail yesterday. I have to report that there’s a bug, right there at the beginning - I got “greeted” by addressing somebody else’s name, not mine
Please take a look at that.
EDIT: Btw, approval e-mails also feature wrong names. So far, I’ve received e-mails addressed to three or four different people!
Another thing you did wrong (imho) is removing description and list of tags from the rejection e-mail. Imho this data is very important - especially for those authors who don’t keep record of that data elsewhere. Once they fix the item and want to resubmit, they have to repeat the work they already did previously - time waste.
I’d really love if you start considering such things to make things better and efficient for your authors, instead of just pushing minor cosmetic changes.
We apologise for you receiving emails addressed to the wrong person. We deployed a fix for this issue a couple of days ago, so please let us know if you receive any further emails with the incorrect name. Note, the outcome of your review is still correct, it’s just that the email was being addressed to the person who reviewed your item instead of you.
Regarding the removal of the description and list of tags from the emails, could you please provide further details about the impact? It’s important to us that we’re not making the process more difficult for our authors. If your item is rejected, and we provide the option to resubmit, the item edit page should already have the title, description and tags filled out based on your original submission. Please let me know if this is not the behaviour on your end.
What you describe is the behavior of “soft reject”. However, when an item is hard rejected, in previous version of rejection e-mail there were description and tags available at the bottom (end) of an email.
You see, even if the item is hard rejected, it doesn’t mean it can’t be improved and resubmitted. That is why we need to have this data, for when we improve our item and resubmit it, to save time not doing things twice.
Oddly enough, since these have rolled out - every single one of them has ended up in my junk mailbox. The older ones were fine, simple and just worked in my opinion.
Love these new emails guys feels really professional now
p.s. it would be great if the “item history” tab items received the same formatting that emails do (i.e. line breaks). Reviewers list the items that need to be fixed one after the other. These come through fine in email but are quite tricky to follow if you’re viewing the “item history” tab.
Btw, is it only me, or is every rejection mail just a plain generic rejection formulation? I have got an enormous amount of senseless rejections and all of them only say that my submission is “too far off”. Nothing more specific, like: lighting, focus, or whatever…
feels really professional now