State of the Union: ThemeForest review queues.

Thank you Kyle - much appreciated.

@matthewcoxy - Hello Matthew, can you please confirm weather we are able to sell the theme’s WP version directly if the themes PSD/HTML is published on Themeforest and we are awaiting approval of Wordpress version on TF. This is only for a handful of customers who has shown impatience and in some cases already bought HTML? Ofcourse if this was allowed, it will help us further enhance our item while we wait, and indeed, we will stop direct sales as soon as the WP is released on Themeforest. Either way, thank you in advance.

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It seems that there’s even a delay for support tickets too…

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And here is a comment from one of the item you listed which got approved in 20 days

EDIT: Another amazing thing with that item is it already got three 5 star ratings in only 5 sales :wink:

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Hey @Waituk,

Yes, I can confirm that the only point at which exclusivity actually applies is when the item is actually approved for sale and on Envato Market. If you or anyone else wishes to sell their items whilst their still in the queue, your more than welcome to do so and it will not violate your exclusivity agreement with Envato.

Some natural rules also go with this. When the item is ultimately approved for sale, you can’t continue to sell the item off of Envato Market. Also, they customer can’t refund their item through Envato or apply for support through envato. The arrangement is exclusively between you and the buyer.

Hope that answers your question :slight_smile:

Hey @matthewcoxy

A lot of authors are saying that new authors are getting bumped up the queue and are only waiting 20-30 days compared to elite authors that are waiting 70-90 days. Can you let us know what is going on with this? :slight_smile:

Hey @MoonBear,

I’ve just been looking into this now actually! To the extent of my understanding this isn’t actually the case currently. There was a bump in the road when we were doing some work on the infrastructure a while back which caused this problem. I suspect any major cases of this could be linked to this event, but that issue has since been fixed.

@ThemeSphere gave some examples above… [quote=“ThemeSphere, post:300, topic:47026, full:true”]
@matthewcoxy Please clarify why are you ignoring the concerns about Elite authors being de-prioritized while non-elites getting relatively higher priority? Here’s the previous post with proof: State of the Union: ThemeForest review queues.

And some more recent ones from today:

http://themeforest.net/item/ux-creative-wordpress-theme/16396099http://themeforest.net/item/cosmedix-health-beauty-yoga-wordpress-theme/16176477
[/quote]

I’ve had the team look into this. The first link provided wasn’t a new author and was still after 45+ days. The second link was a new author but took 51 days (including resubmissions). I suspect most of the ones that people are talking about were from when the queue prioritisation was changed for a week and then reverted. Bare in mind, if an item has been rejected, then re-submitted it moves through the queue at a faster rate.

I am going to keep looking into this to confirm, however.

Also, the prioritisation only applies to 1M+ Elite authors.

Hope that helps :slight_smile:

Hey @matthewcoxy

Thanks for the update on that :slight_smile:

Will it be possible for you to weigh the pros and cons of also adding elite authors to the prioritisation ?

Matt says that an item took 51 days with ressubmissions as this is a long time…we got our first review after 68 days and had 2 soft of 3 days each, so 51 days seems like a really short time right now.

Thanks Kyle for the post. But respectfully your point of views is skewed as the current problem does not affect you and your history with X starting also are not the same, rejected first item and waiting for first response is a different story altogether.

New authors know what awaits them old authors that built there business model and rely on review times that were before are faced with horrible times which is not there fault. And selling before it comes online well… really?
One question if you started selling well on your own why then move on TF?

Sorry to be a bit harsh but this post is pure attempt on sugar coated motivation without specific actions that can be backed by evidence or examples. X is not an example.

Our move was to go to update frenzy, we started to evaluate the old products which we will remove and which redesign/update. But again we had luck for now that the new theme that got online in the last moment started selling semi ok. Before that we had to take a loan and invest more to survive.

Once you rely on a system and have employees and certain cash flow goes by by, even if you mange to pivot it takes time in that time you need to either tap into reserves, if you have them, or loan money that’s the harsh truth.

But i salute your attempt.

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Thanks for the reply. The second post wasn’t a very good example as it was 45-50 days (still better than what most Elites are getting at 60-80 days for FIRST review - not resubmissions). But if you had investigated the links from the previous post, there were better examples: State of the Union: ThemeForest review queues.

It may have been fixed for good this time considering I haven’t come across more examples in the past 2 days. Should I find more of them, I will post an update.

It is the best if we can see the weekly report on this issue [review time] or something like this !!! :slight_smile:
Thanks

Its more than 4 month, there is nothing better solution for this case, Oh My GOD

What?! My partner waiting 73 days and still in review process, for 1st review not resubmission. Elite author with 27 WP items! So now beginners with 1st upload have priority?

My guess tells me that new authors submissions has higher priority because Envato can get more money from them due the commision for new authors is lower in comparisson with Elite ones.

Just my two cents.

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We need to make peace with the fact that their only priority is profit!

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An AudioJungle state of the union post would be appreciated. Up to 30 days when themeforest is around 23.

Yep it’s nothing personal just business. Union is our only way. :slight_smile:

@matthewcoxy I just want to share my experience with you. We are elite author since long time and we submitted our latest theme on April 21. We received the first soft about 10 days ago. It’s a theme for guest holders, the best period for coming out was spring. We are going to lose money and visibility but it’s OK, it’s part of the game, I can understand.

Unfortunately our theme is still pending and I feel like you are playing us. We’ve just received the 5th soft from 3 different reviewers. The first one was simply ridiculous, it contained dubious statements about design like “typography improvement” (I’ve always paid great attention to modular scale and vertical rhythm) and an implicite invite to alter the comment_form() core function because, according to the reviewer, “Comments are required by default”. The second one included other “advices” about visual improvements. The third one was pretty funny: we forgot to update the demo (there was an unrendered shortcode in my demo footer); also, the reviewer invited us to update the item description explaining that the theme doesn’t support submenus. “OK, no problem, keep calm” I told to myself. Fourth soft: the reviewer pointed out that there were some unescaped strings… “Oh, poor me! He’s right, I didn’t noticed that! …but why reporting that only now???” And now, here’s the fifth: among the other things, it contains advices like “Prefix everything and use unique consistent slugs”, “theme doesn’t need to use wp register when adding script and styles, wp enqueue will be enough” (the reviewer didn’t notice that I had to register the scripts before because I was using wp_localize_script!), etc. All kind of things I’ve never read in your submission requirements.

You know, there is always a better way to rewrite your code, it’s an endless job. Btw, considering that we’ve been waiting for 77 days, you could at least avoid to split all your advices in so many soft rejects and avoid to be so needlessly stickler. That’s freaking frustrating.

I hope you can fix these problems soon because those kind of things are not worthy of your name and we don’t deserve such a treatment. Cheers.

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As long as I can remember the site templates review time has always said 16 days. Now on the 16th day for my upload the time gets bumped to 23 days. After 23 days what are the odds the time gets bumped to 30 days? You can’t make this stuff up :joy:

This has been exactly our experience for the past year or so with Themeforest reviews. Each reviewer has a different opinion about your design, your code, and you have to conform to each and every one or you won’t get approved.

@matthewcoxy - Want to save hundreds of hours in the Theme Review Queue ? Propose to Envato a theme review checklist that authors can check off for each theme before submitting a new theme.

Something like this:

I confirm that this theme:

  1. [checkbox] is using unique functions prefixes or namespaces. Read more here.
  2. [checkbox] has styled multi-level comments
  3. [checkbox] uses only wp_enqueue_script, not wp_register_script . Read more here
    […]
  4. [checkbox] another requirement
  5. [checkbox] another requirement 2

Then - when a theme is reviewed - instead of the reviewers having to use their copy-pasting of points, they could just “uncheck” some of these and comment on them if needed.

We need consistent public theme submission rules! That way we can work on them before submitting. It should also not be possible for a reviewer to reject for any other reason that is mentioned on the said public rule list.

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