Over the last year the huge improvements in reviewing time, which were a major QoL improvement since I first started submitting in 2021, have begun to slip away. People in my area have seen steadily increasing reviewing times that in some cases are hitting a month and a half now, sometimes not even leaving the queue for more than two weeks. I hope we are not seeing a return to the slog days of the early 2020s when submitting was a misery, especially in urban areas.
Submitters are waiting longer, getting more duplicates, and iterating less due to turnaround times which have been getting consistently worse.
I think some people will see this and point out that it’s better than it was a five years ago, and that’s true, but it is far, far worse than it was a year ago, and I think that’s worth pointing out. People might also note that some areas have shorter review times, which is great, and longer ones, which is bad. The process consistently worsening to the point where submissions are taking five to ten times longer then they used to with no indications of the trend improving should be a red flag that the balance between reviewers and submitters is not in a healthy place and there might need to be changes.
Times in Glasgow recently also spiked, up to just over a month. As of the last three days, there has been a massive improvement, and we are back down to ~1 week.
They did just recently change the Wayfinder rating so that some folks have a LOT more available submissions now. Yes, I am one of the “back in my day, it took years to get a nomination decided without an upgrade” people, but I think it is good to note this slowdown. Many people seem to have stopped reviewing with upgrades not being needed.
Unweigerlich fällt mir dazu wieder die lange Festschreibung von drei Monaten für den Bonusort ein. Ich denke, dass eine Zeit von vier Wochen hierbei auch schon hilfreich wäre.
In my hometown, decisions take more than a month. I’m on vacation right now and things are hardly spending more than two days in voting. I honestly think they changed something about review areas in addition to more stuff being nominated
I see something very similar whenever I happen to be submitting outside of a major city. It seems like the sacrificial cells where there’s many reviewers who can’t get their own nominations through subsidizing quieter areas are back.
Since I’ve posted this things have only gotten worse, most resolutions are coming from the staff intervening and my rate of submissions is significantly higher than the rate of things clearing so it seems like there’s every reason to think the situation will continue to degrade.
If there’s so few reviewers available that the staff are going to handle it anyway then what’s the point of the voting flow at all? The voters we do have are wasting their effort.
I hate to see my fears come true. After they increased our submissions from 1 a day with 40 at a time to 10 a day with basically unlimited potential this was the likley result. Reviewing at the time was at an all time low of just a few days as the Machine Learning program weeded out the easy coal. The sudden inflow of nominations needed to be matched by a 10× increase in our reviewing but though some of us did pick up more many people do not review much. So the backlog builds. Like all new things many people will stop submitting so much as review times increase and they run out of nearby easy things to submit. Old submitters will fall into a slower pattern of boom bust as they travel. Then just new submitters will be trying everything at once and they only get 1 a day with 10 at a time. The backlog will balance and review times will increase again but probably be more in the range of a couple weeks instead of a few days. I don’t think we will ever be permenantly stuck in the era of reviews taking 6+ months to a year again. The only issue is the old submitters who try to abuse the system with easy fakes and can make hundreds at a time. This is where we are currently, with support times increasing as they deal with the abuse and ban those that commit it.
This system has always depended on people committing to reviewing more submissions than they make. Do your part if you want fast review times. The common adage is “review 10 for every 1 you submit”.
In other news if we finally have a backlog again then we might be able to do global challenges once more!
I don’t think I’ll be able to review my way out of this one. I hardly get reviews from my area anyway. I don’t even really see a path forward since even my greatly reduced rate of submitting is faster than the rate at which things are resolved.
It can’t help that the freeze also led to a bunch of local wayfarers quitting. They might not be submitting but once their submissions stopped being reviewed they stopped reviewing too.
There’s tons of areas in the country with two day turnarounds still so it seems like this could be fixed if they just distributed things properly.
