I have recently submitted an item that was hard rejected. Going through all guidelines dealing with required quality of items I have not found anything except subjective estetic preferences of reviewer to be a reason for that.
Neither contacting support, nor the email notification provided me with more details - only general statements. I already have several templates that are objectivelly good and being sold well. For me the decision here looks so much subjective.
Please have a look on this PDF a help me if you can provide more feedback.
‘It has to be good’ is probably the most accurate guideline you’re going to get. Sounds ridiculous, but if you think it through… what would an official document on quality standards contain? It’s impossible to specify what makes a design ‘good’ in any kind of quantifiable measures.
Yes, you could have some kind of list that says something like ‘fonts must be current and in-keeping with the design’… but what does that mean? What is in-keeping with the design and what isn’t? Or it could say, ‘colors must complement each other’ etc etc. It’s impossible to have a document that specifies what you can include and what you can’t… what looks good and what doesn’t, which fonts are ok and which aren’t.
Why? Because any such stipulations would limit creativity and would be based on existing items… they couldn’t take into account items which haven’t been submitted yet. The ‘rules’ of today can rarely predict or plan for the designs of tomorrow.
Yes, it’s a bit of a wishy-washy explanation, but you’ve got to think to yourself… if you were the head of the review team for GraphicRiver, and you had to write a document on quality standards, what would it contain, what would it look like? Is it possible to objectively define exactly what is in and what is out based on specific yes/no answers?
Of course it’s subjective… what else could it be? Training could be provided using existing items or items that had been sent for review… what we like, what we don’t like, why something was accepted, why it was rejected… but a subjective decision is going to have to come into play every time a new item is submitted. An item which wasn’t used as an example during training.
While you’re imagining being part of the review team… imagine the hypothetical situation of somebody in the forums insinuating you and your team might be incompetent. Imagine how that inspires you, and makes you really root for that person to get their items accepted.
Do you really think that Envato is supposed to answer thousands of authors whose works are not of high quality?
They do not have time for this. And they are not required to do this
You’re not going to get anything from the forums besides more subjective opinions. Plus deciding the reviewers might be incompetent is pointless. If you really want to know why that specific item was rejected, probably better to contact support. There are plenty of possible reasons, for example it was a rare mistake, the item was too similar to others, etc. Like romlan said, you can’t expect feedback for every rejection - there are just too many items being uploaded.
Thank you guys - really appreciate your responses. I do not want to insinuate anybody, however, what are the tools to get feedback? I have first wrote on forum, read the articles, nobody replied to a point, then contacted support with no success(they recommend me to ask here again) and for now nobody commented on the design. I will take anything - it is bad, uselless or too common. I was going to earn money here, not doing a marketing for Envato primarily, so I really put effort and create an item that is not that common. Spending 4 days on developing an item, then got hard rejected without a possibility getting any feedback is really discouraging to build/contribute in the future, because the risk is very high. Note that I am not begginer here. Already earned few thousands of dollar with just few items.
They have badges for that. Although a high selling author is more likely to get in item approved (purely beacause they’re more likely to upload good stuff) they still have to go through the review process and are held to the same standard’s.
Actually they give some feedback. It’s called «Soft reject». But if the reiewing item don’t have enough quality, they just reject it. And (I will repeat): They don’t have time for feedback writing to thousands of authors whose works are not of high quality. No matter who uploaded an item (new author or bad sellers or authors that already earned Envato few thousands of dollars). They need only best quality items
@romlam I totally accept that - they are in charge, hard rejection are not worth any specific feedbacks. Deal closed. Only wondering why we are wasting time here with this discussion. I was asking for feedback here as Envato support recommended me. But not getting any. Thank you guys anyway and good luck to everybody.
Well, to be fair, about 10% of your original post was asking for feedback, 90% of it was complaining about the reviewers and the review process… so it seemed like that was the main thing you wanted to discuss.
Someone knocking in your door and asking for buying the cookies (for example), and you reject his suggestion. And now imagine that he demand an explanation. Does he have any right to this?
Except asking for a feedback, you expressed your indignation towards the Envato team. That’s why people write about reviewers. And how can anybody give you feedback if your link dose not work???
You are all right, guys, again - one can deny any cookies and I would just not bother anybody writing here. I only proceed as instructed. The link is working for me (it is a dropbox link, maybe copy/paste it to your browser), I tried to upload it primarily but file upload is not allowed for new forum members. @romlam I change my headline (removed incompetent) and except that I cannot see any indignation in my topic - just described the situationed as it was: I studied guidelines first, then wrote on envato forum first time - nobody provided any feedback, then kindly contacted support,
they recommended me to wrote here again, so I created a new bit accented topic so that someone reacted. That it is. @SpaceStockFootage I do not know how you calculated that 10:90% ratio, but I asked for the feedback repeatedly.
Finaly my short observation: graphicriver has enormous number of invoice templates and I have recently uploaded one just because it was from a project that I liked and customized bit and add some specific feature to it. This is not gonna sell and I will probably move it somewhere to be downloaded for free. The review process here was done without any rejection. I would have no problem if they just rejected that item, just because there so much of staff like that and many are much better. I specialize in interactive PDF and my items in this category are one of the best selling, while the quality of similiar items from 5 years ago is rather poor in my eyes. And why should we not talk about that, everybody can be a bit wrong, righ?
The point I would like to make here is that we all need feedback and listen. I am sorry if I offended anybody.
It was a rough estimation, but if you want ‘the math’… your original post and title contained 102 words. 16 of those words were requesting feedback, 86 weren’t… so that makes 15% rather than 10%. I wasn’t that far off!
Fair enogh. Thank you…