State of the Union: ThemeForest review queues.

I was thinking same,
with all the points that you posted

I’m going to submit a few multi-purpose apps :stuck_out_tongue:

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@matthewcoxy

+1

+1

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Considering that it is nearly impossible to provide accurate comments for every soft/ hard rejected item, I believe that Envato should create a whole new website, like guidelines.envato.com, and fill it with articles, extensive guidelines with visual examples and try to cover all the details that would possibly lead to a hard/ soft rejection. I know that we already have general guidelines to follow, but I think a dedicated site would probably be helpful to our community.

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I wonder what’s the point of this move. Because the way I see it:
1.) It will slow down review times
2.) Will bring more items to already more or less saturated market
3.) Will bring more poor quality items

I don’t see any benefits for authors nor for buyers. Because more poor items -> more dissatisfied buyers -> more buyers leaving the marketplace -> no more Envato in 2020

Quality standards are already extremely low (at least design wise), you should raise it if anything.

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30 days here

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We dont have any guidelines currently. They haven’t updated the submission requirements in a very long time

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Was that the reply and explanation we were waiting for this week?

To me this statement is not enough, it doesn’t say much. When do you estimate times will be back to normal? Or at least under a month for a wp?

In your statement you say that you have a lot more submissions. Shouldn’t this make the quality go up? I mean you have where to choose from…why decrease the quality and accept more items? This makes no sense…

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They’re not. They’re still rejecting items that wouldn’t have normally been approved, but are allowing more leeway when it comes to what is soft rejected, rather than just hard rejecting them all. That will give more authors more chance to get their items up to the grade. So the level of quality accepted on the site will still be the same.

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I disagree!

All the users should have the same priority.

Envato should make a list with technical indications such as:

This is allowed:…

This is not allowed: …

this is recomanded but not mandatory …

On my first html template i had some soft reject reasons that can be stored online in a documentation so that we can read it before we submit (maybe a link on submit page it would be nice)

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Even after hard reject, they can still improve their items and resubmit. If the item is so bad it wouldn’t be even soft-rejected (in the past, before this new “policy”), it is highly unrealistic that its author will be able to bring it to the high quality standards within days or even weeks. It will lead into countless of resubmissions, until the reviewer will approve it because “it is good enough”.

This change will lead into more poor items being approved, mark my words. The fact, that in the past months there were several EXTREMELY subpar items approved, just confirms my fears.

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But how does altering the criteria for soft rejects, alter the criteria for hard rejects? I’ve heard plenty of times where items have been soft rejected several times without being approved… so that shows you that reviewers are sticking to their guns when it comes to the guidelines for approval. Reviewing is their job, and they’re reviewing tens of thousands a week… I can’t see them approving stuff, just to get one more potential resubmission out of the queue.

Godspeed engineers!

p.s. Please take some before/after screenshots. I’d really love to see the review process!

Well, reviews are subjective. Something which can pass with one reviews may not pass with other one. That’s normal, it is not possible for all reviewers to have “same eyes”, this is part of the deal. Required quality standard is an abstract term (at least when it comes to design). So, if you increase the number of items passing this soft-reject “input”, it is just logical that there will be more poor items on the “output” as well. I would love to be wrong on this one, but again, there were several very, very poor items already approved recently, so I don’t think I am fabricating that much.

Just to be clear, I am talking specifically about ThemeForest. This may make sense for other marketplaces. It just IMHO don’t make sense for WP themes, where developing a good theme even for already experienced author can take easily several months. When an aspiring theme author gets hard rejected, the best thing he can do is to start from scratch and do it better. But now, if he gets SR instead of HR, he will just start fixing his junk code, until it become total mess. A mess which will maybe pass the review, but it will contain a LOT of issues. The kind of issues which can’t be potentially caught in a review because such review would take hours, but making the theme unusable in real life scenarios. And this will lead into bad ratings, angry buyers and so on.

Do I exaggerate little too much? Probably yes, but I just don’t see how this is good for this marketplace.

First and most important thing is not to change the reviewer each time for the re-uploaded reviewed item. Let the same reviewer review the item till it gets approved.

Reviewer A - Author - First Review
Reviewer A - Author - Soft Reject
Reviewer A - Author - Soft Reject
Reviewer A - Author - Approved

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New authors have not built their livelyhood around themeforest, they haven’t got employees or offices. They also don’t have the experience of dealing with hundreds of buyers. There has been many occasions where a first item gets rrally popular makes lots of sales but gets tons of 2 stars because it had major problems

Code quality is some what subjective too. There are plenty of debates on github projects or wordpress on slack between people who reat know there stuff. There are things that all experts agree on some things that they will debate

Just because you already have a theme that sells good and you are Elite author that doesn’t really mean that your next theme will be any better than theme from some new author. Theme update reviews are already prioritized and they get reviewed in 1-2 hours so any theme that made you elite will not suffer.

Most popular themes from elite authors that I saw are not coded by current ThemeForest rules, so I don’t see how would those authors produce better themes by default when even their current themes are not by current TF standards. And review times have been hot topic for months on this forums, you had to waste Envato support time with questions about review times… that doesn’t sound like your team is on top of things regarding ThemeForest.

Why would Elite authors get any privileges for new themes? Is it not enough that you had a head start with much lower standards for code review and you are making more money (lower author fees) than new authors?

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I bought items from elite authors and I must say that the support is very bad in some cases. And the quality is very very bad in some cases.

But just because some elite authors make something wrong or new authors create bad themes, doesn’t mean that all the new authors or all the elite authors are creating low quality themes.

Maybe people unde 18 years shouldn’t be allowed on this market. Maybe this will filter low quality content, I don’t know.

Envato should analyze carefully what is the best way of triming the queque by creating some statistics

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