Things that went wrong on TF

After couple of months being here I have to adress some issues that were present here on TF and sum it up.

1. High approval standards

We heard about Level 2 quality control, wright? But did we experience it? Well maybe, or not? Everybody is talking so much about it and we still see some templates approved that in most authors opinion didn’t deserve to be there (comparing to their templates). So, I know You can’t just delete those items and that it takes time for so some cleanup, but why do You still approve some items that are under the quality bar?

Also, some of designers here on TF are great freelancers or full time employed designers with 5+ years experience so I think they deserve some respect (assuming their design is up to standards).

Onuro had one similar issue here http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/please-remove-ie6-compatibility-from-submission-approval-standards/8623

oh this too http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/quality-control/7296

2. Reviewer Comments on rejected design

We all know they are very poor. I experienced some rejections at the beginning and that’s ok. But the reviewer comments were not what I was expecting. Simply saying that Your item got rejected doesn’t help us much.

Jeffrey said somewhere that the reviewer job is not to write what should be improved or not but to just to filter not suited items. What? Jeffrey, are You serious? As a reviewer I would make suggestions on rejected design if it needs some improvement or if it doesn’t fit at all I would tell the author to start all over again. Is this so hard to do? I don’t know how long it takes You to review one item, I guess about half an hour is quite a lot time to do the work, and then in that time for example You can’t provide some quality suggestions? Also there have been rejections and resubmitting that took a week or so because the reviewer didn’t said in the first place what should be redone! What? I mean common, You’re driving us like little monkeys here just to gain some more time, or am I wrong? Please forgive me if I offended someone, this is just my personal conclusion about this. If a reviewer has a full time job and also does his job on TF then this is no excuse. Why are You a reviewer if You don’t have time to do the TF job? I think this is also one issue that has to be cleared.

nice story here http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/a-rejection-story-for-designers-and-approvers/8634?page=1

I will not comment the design here.

also I requested indirectly to become a reviewer here http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/how-to-become-a-reviewer/7880 or just to know how I can became one.

3. Upload Queue

I have experienced some queue problems lately here http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/upload-times-getting-rediculous/8635?page=1

I agree that 2 days to review an item is great, but what about this strange queue problem I personally experienced? Also sometimes happens that authors wait 5 days to get approved!

4. General Site problems

So where to start here?

Ok, first I would like to speak about Site management. I know for sure that Jeffrey Way is doing a lot of work and that he almost doesn’t have some time for his family, but hey, being a TF and NETTUTS Site manager, TF Reviewer and Forum moderator at the same time, answering tons of emails and writing articles for both sites, this is the problem!

For example, I requested from Jeff to giveaway one template (fresh made, not in my portfolio) for Christmas on TF Blog or anywhere on the site. After almost 14 email conversations, which took about 2 weeks, he said, “I’ll be posting it Christmas morning”. Nothing happened till then and I just uploaded it for sale. Why? You could said in the first place maybe that this is not going to work and I would be fine with that, but I guess You just couldn’t find time to post it on the Blog.

Also the featured artist section was in delay. I guess it’s on weekly basis, but last featured author was there for almost two weeks! Please give me some explanation.

I know that TF is still young but that should be no excuse because there is Flashden and some issues could have been learned from there. Also this refers to Reviewers and everything else.

5. The famous % on sales

i will just refer to this post http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/just-doesnt-make-sense/8505

I’m very satisfied with my sales and payment rates for now, but still would love to see some changes in the near future.

This post should be taken as contribution to TF. Also this post represents only my opinion and I never meant to make someone offended. Please do not take this personally, whoever is reading this.

@1 and 2

Revierwers are just humans, when they believe something is nice, they will accept it, but when something sucks in their eyes, they will reject it. Also, sometimes they might have a worse day, right? If I would be a reviewer I would be doing what must be done but hey, after few hours of reviewing themes everyone might get sick

@3

It’s a technical issue, don’t blame hard drive for world’s hunger…

@4

Again, don’t blame Jeffrey only because he is working hard. Hell, my article for TF blog is waiting for review for over a week but I’m not angry because of this. TF is young as you said and it’s not earning enough money to support bigger staff as FlashDen might. With time, things will get better, trust me.

@5

Imagine, that without these 25% FlashDen wouldn’t be as big as it is today, TF, AJ and VH wouldn’t exist now too.

So generaly, you’re compaining that you’re earning too little, but you don’t care about TF’s earnings, yet still you want they give you things they can’t give you without proper money, eh?

@Mastergreed I can see from Your comment that You haven’t read my post trough out and made a quick reply. Or You missed my point.

I’m not complaining, I’m just making a roundup of issues that I or someone else experienced in the past months so this issues can be resolved. Or at least we can get some more answers about that.

I’m very happy with TF, it’s just that after repeating problems, I and I guess everybody else would like to see some changes / improvements, otherwise there wouldn’t be so much forum threads about the similar subject.

So I will repeat what I wrote at last:

This post should be taken as contribution to TF. Also this post represents only my opinion and I never meant to make someone offended. Please do not take this personally, whoever is reading this.

And here we go another thread proving my point over and over again. You’ve bought up some great points but in this post I want to reply to Mastergreeds statements, this isn’t an attack on anybody I just need to clear a few things up:

”@1 and 2: Revierwers are just humans, when they believe something is nice, they will accept it, but when something sucks in their eyes, they will reject it. Also, sometimes they might have a worse day, right? If I would be a reviewer I would be doing what must be done but hey, after few hours of reviewing themes everyone might get sick :P”

That isn’t an excuse, reviewers are doing a job, they are paid to review, having a bad day is no reason to take it out on a designer. A good review team should consist of more that one person, someone should review it and then pass it onto another reviewer to add their opinions. That would get rid of many of the problems we have at the moment. But thats twice as much money so TF wont touch that idea.

”@4: Again, don’t blame Jeffrey only because he is working hard. Hell, my article for TF blog is waiting for review for over a week but I’m not angry because of this. TF is young as you said and it’s not earning enough money to support bigger staff as FlashDen might. With time, things will get better, trust me.”

I’m not going to blame Jeffrey, he works very hard. However, ThemeForest is a business and if you had to wait a week for somebody to call you back over the phone on your request for example you’d be extremely pissed. The only reason TF gets away with this is because people don’t see this as a business, but IT IS , I can tell you now if they had any major competitors they’d change their tune and get their act together. The only reason they are not running this site properly is because they know that we cant go anywhere else without spending a fortune. “With time, things will get better, trust me.” As I said in a previous thread, they’ve had 4 months, thats enough time to get things sorted after all they have enough other marketplaces to learn from. There is no excuse for having to wait a week for a review.

”@5: Imagine, that without these 25% FlashDen wouldn’t be as big as it is today, TF, AJ and VH wouldn’t exist now too.”

I’m not gonna go on about the percentage argument again because I’ve had enough of it, they said they’ll discuss it in a meeting, if they are anything like any other business then they’ll just dismiss it. At the moment I think they need to sort out the management of the site rather than anything else.

Just my final thought for now, when ThemeForest was in beta I was really excited about it, I talked to load of designers about it, my blog turned from a tutorial, resource etc. blog to a “lets praise ThemeForest” blog, I had a few people that were with me, but I had at least 20 or so people who I had arguments with over it saying that ThemeForest is just going to ruin the design industry, how its not going to give designers what they deserve and quite a few attacks against the company behind it. But I stayed on your side and defended it, what many of these people have said have now come true, we are seeing a new thread from pissed off designers near enough everyday now on this forum, and you’re using the same excuses every damn time, and nothing is being done about it, its not good enough.

At the moment I think they need to sort out the management of the site rather than anything else.

Exactly! This can’t be done by one man band. You should strongly consider splitting the job on two or more people.

@4 Hm… Don’t blame Jeffrey. He has a lot of work. Look, my article for themeforest blog is approved. But, i had some grammar issues, so Jeffrey mailed me to fix them. I fixed them all and sent it to him. Waiting 1 week…

At the moment I think they need to sort out the management of the site rather than anything else.

Exactly! This can’t be done by one man band. You should strongly consider splitting the job on two or more people.

Yep, it seems that Jeffrey is the only member of staff on this site now, I noticed a while back a few other members of staff would be on the forum answering threads, now they’ve disappeared so theres obviously something going on. As I’ve said, I have nothing against Jeffrey, he does a great job, but he needs help, he’s doing too much on his own and it’s is now obvious (through these threads) that there needs to be more people working on the site.

Oh Mark, of course we’ve missed you.