Hey everyone,
Over the last couple of months we have been observing the discussion on the review wait times. We noticed that a lot of you had either contributed to or viewed these discussions across many threads.
The team here at Envato thought ‘hey this is a great opportunity for us to be more transparent with our amazing authors and community’. As part of Hack Fort, the Heartbeat team have created a place for you, our community, to see the average review queue turnaround times broken down by marketplace, category and submission-type.
Introducing… (insert drum roll) … quality.market.envato.com
The Quality Team is constantly looking at how we can be more transparent, and making changes to our processes to improve review. Publicising the average review queue turnaround times is just one of the many projects we are working on to improve the review experience for authors.
We trust that you will love it as much as we do!
Now for some important stuff:
Continuing with the theme of complete transparency, we believe it’s important that we address some of the comments and questions that are often raised when we discuss the review queues.
Q: How long will it take for you to review my item?
A: It’s important to note that the review queue does not operate on a simple first in first out basis; rather there is a somewhat complex prioritisation algorithm that is designed to give a ‘Fair Go’ to all authors. For example, if you submit an item and it gets soft rejected for a simple correction/adjustment, and then you re-submit it, we wouldn’t want your item to be returned back to the bottom of the queue. There are also other reasons why your submission may be prioritised (or even deprioritised). This makes forecasting turnaround times challenging, however we believe that the new level of transparency around average wait times will assist in setting more realistic expectations. We know how difficult it can be to patiently wait for us to get to your item. Please know that the Quality Team takes reviewing each and every submission very seriously and we work very hard to get through as many items as possible each day, week and month of the year.
Q: 10 days!? Why not hire more reviewers!?
A: As a business we are constantly weighing up various factors to make informed decisions around resourcing. We monitor the queues very closely, forecast into the future, and recruit when appropriate. There are however, times when the queues will still extend to a greater number of days than usual. Various factors impact this including seasonal increases in submissions, reviewers taking leave (they need a holiday too sometimes) or getting sick, delays in recruitment, security incidents, unexpected increases in submissions, or other factors outside of our control. We are constantly working to address these factors as best we can and will keep you updated on anything you need to be aware of.
On a final note, a big thankyou to you, our amazing community! Continue submitting your incredible content, and we will continue to work hard to get it reviewed as quickly as possible. We hope you like having greater visibility into the queue wait times.
Speak to you soon,
Karl (& Your Quality Team)