In reply to Mag.

Hey Mag,

I'm probably not the best person to address most of your queries, but I can certainly address this part:

Was wondering the other day, if the reviewers actually get paid or is it volunteer work. At times they will neat pick single lines but demonstrate rather limited knowledge themselves and once confronted with arguments they tend to fall back on automated responses. Other times, it seems they don’t even bother to unzip the package, just flag it and get it over with.

I recently started at Envato and lead the team of reviewers for ThemeForest.

The reviewers do get paid! And we've just employed a couple more. The reviewers are skilled (and they are all good people!). We have processes in place and guidelines to check against. We use a variation of the Theme-Check plugin to automate some of that. We do unzip every package before they get approved.

But yes, at times we can be inconsistent. That will always be a challenge when you have different people checking lots of different items. We're working on it! We have processes which should help, but a large part of the problem is that, until recently, we were understaffed. With high volume and limited resources, comes increased pressure and increased chance of mistakes, etc. We're only human after all! That's why we've employed more reviewers. We want to make things more consistent and we recognised that we need to better support our reviewers.

And um, automated responses, yeah. When you have a high volume of items coming through and see very similar issues arise again and again, the efficient thing is to work out some common responses. That saves time which can then be spent on other things (eg reviewing!). Most businesses do this - but it's fair to say that most of our auto responses could be a lot better and more helpful! It's on the list of things to address!

There are other things we can improve too. Once again, we're working on it.

I will also say that since I've started with Envato, I've actually been surprised how important the company values are to them. Their main value is "When the community succeeds, we succeed". They really believe that and make decisions based on that. That's not to say they get it right all the time! It's impossible to keep everyone happy when running such large marketplaces and growing so quickly will result in issues. But it's been refreshing to me to see a company that puts the community before $... #viewsfromtheinside.

Cheers,
Stephen