[theme-reviewers] Payment Option for Theme Reviews

[Chip Bennett]

But the review queue *isn't* our job - not for the reviewers or for the
admins. It doesn't put a roof over our families' heads or food on our
table. And quite frankly, speaking for myself, I simply can't afford or
justify putting in the 10-20 hours a week it was taking to keep things
under better control.

The review incentive program worked, and worked well. Unfortunately, it
wasn't possible to keep it from becoming a pay-to-play situation, and it
had to be discontinued. Thus far, nothing has been identified to take its
place, and we have gotten zero direction from anyone regarding what we can
do to replace the review incentive program.

Despite its flaws, the review incentive program worked:

[image: Inline image 1]

The review queue disappeared (except for a peak around Christmas, as always
happens). And the rule that reopened tickets didn't count drove down the
number of tickets getting reopened. Most impressively, the queue time
decreased even as the input (tickets opened) increased. Now, as you can
see, the review queue was nowhere near as bad as it was before we
implemented the incentive program, but it is clearly trending in the wrong
direction.

But in the end, this is a volunteer activity. Developers volunteer to
submit free Themes. Reviewers volunteer their time for free to review and
approve those Themes.


On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 3:10 PM, Michael Hebenstreit <michael at mhthemes.com>
wrote:

> As stated before, unfortunately not. But as stated before, it seems
> volunteer work doesn’t work well anymore and it might be the time to think
> about new solutions. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with
> waiting a few weeks for theme approval and I fully respect the work of all
> reviewers and admins. But when we are honest and rational, we have to admit
> that this doesn’t work well. If this would be a company and the review
> queue would be client issues, we wouldn’t do our job very well. :-)
>
>
> Am 31.07.2014 um 22:04 schrieb Emil Uzelac <emil at uzelac.me>:
>
> Have you helped with the queue yet?
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 3:01 PM, Michael Hebenstreit <michael at mhthemes.com
> > wrote:
>
>> That doesn’t help the review queue and also won’t mark themes as live.
>> :-)
>>
>>
>> Am 31.07.2014 um 21:58 schrieb Emil Uzelac <emil at uzelac.me>:
>>
>> And you can get paid for reviews too, just go to
>> http://jobs.wordpress.net/ and problem solved ;)
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 2:52 PM, Michael Hebenstreit <
>>> michael at mhthemes.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> At the moment it seems that a lot of unexperienced reviewers are being
>>>> motivated on WordCamps around the world. They review a few themes during
>>>> the contribution day and then it’s over (in most cases).
>>>>
>>>> WordCamps aren't recruitment drives. Those sessions should be entirely
>>> for the benefit of the people there, not for any other purpose. Our goal at
>>> WordCamps, overall, is to educate and inform (and meet and greet and BBQ
>>> and so on).
>>>
>>> If showing somebody how the theme review works and having them do one
>>> for hands on experience helps them in any way, then that was the point.
>>> Whether the result is useful to us or not is irrelevant, we only care
>>> whether or not it was useful for that person.
>>>
>>> Wordcamps are for the Wordcampers. If they decide to continue reviewing,
>>> great. If not, that's okay too.
>>>
>>> -Otto
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> theme-reviewers mailing list
>>> theme-reviewers at lists.wordpress.org
>>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
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>>
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