There is no way to say that.

We get most submissions, as a rule, when schools are out - these also tend to be submissions that need a lot of work. Editors tend to be busy with their offline lives at the times when everybody is busy, such as the Christmas holidays.

Is there a huge backlog now, please?

Not really. In the "Quiz Creation" section, there is a link to current wait times. They seem kind of light to me, compared to normal.

Patience, they say, is a virtue. Sometimes I've gone several weeks without a quiz being looked at. I have done my best to learn patience; it's not easy.


Here's the current wait times. (missing categories are empty queues)

Category Current Average Wait
Religion 4 to 6 day(s)
Brain Teasers 4 to 4 day(s)
Music 3 to 7 day(s)
General 3 to 12 day(s)
Television 2 to 5 day(s)
Movies 2 to 3 day(s)
Humanities 2 to 2 day(s)
Hobbies 2 to 4 day(s)
Geography 1 to 1 day(s)
Literature 1 to 3 day(s)
Animals 1 to 2 day(s)
For Children 1 to 2 day(s)
Celebrities Within 2 days day(s)
Sports Within 2 days day(s)
People Within 2 days day(s)
Video Games Within 2 days day(s)
History Within 2 days day(s)

It really depends on the category. General has quite a few quizzes right now, but they've been looked at in big blocks. All in due time.

OK, thank you

Two weeks is not that long I suppose. In two chunks each a week long either side of the minor edit requested.

It also depends on how well you are with the editors. If you submit quizzes that require more work and are more error-riddled, you'll be put to the end.

well thank you for those kind words

Of my ten quizzes already on-line, most went through with no editing needed at all. The others needed onlyy minor revisions. I hope that stands me in good stead.

When your quiz requires more than one submission, it can feel like forever, but the waiting time only applies to the most recent submission. When you set up your template, you should see a message saying something to the effect of expecting to wait for up to a week or longer. This applies each time! As has been explained elsewhere, there are many reasons for possible delays - sometimes your topic is one that only one of the editors in the category handles, for one reason or another; if you have already started working with one editor on a quiz, your resubmission will normally wait for that editor to have time to edit, etc. And, of course, there is the fact that editors have lives, too. I would ideally edit at least one quiz every day, but when my work hours get too long, I just don't have the time, and have to wait until the weekend to edit in a batch. Unfortunately, if I am in that editing mode, and you submit a quiz on Sunday evening (my time), I might not even know it's there until nearly six days later.

Something else that has been mentioned many times, but bears repeating, is the fact that if you work on your quiz after it has been submitted, that changes the submit date to the last time you touched it and sends it to the bottom of the queue.
This is something that many quiz writers don't realize. If you fiddle with your quiz after submission, you might think your quiz has been in the queue for a week but when we look at it, it might say only one day.

I am not a fiddler!

Do you play cello then?

I didn't mean to suggest that you , personally did. I was just restating the point for anyone reading the thread.

I am attempting to learn the kalimba

Panic over! It took 15 days altogether in the end

Just a quick question for those in the know? What is the number of quizzes that one has to have online before they can submit 10 at a time?

It's not based on number of quizzes, but on the author/editor relationship. And any author who has ten quizzes in the queues at a time is going to have quizzes deliberately held back by editors - we don't like bombing the front page.

Although it is amusing when you see two of your quizzes, one after the other, in the new quiz list.

It is often said that those authors that consistently submit error-riddled, grammatically incorrect and inaccurate quizzes are usually pushed to the back of the queue, so I have a question for the editors:

Are there any of you that particularly specialise in dealing with this type of quiz? Do any of you enjoy, even prefer, to deal with these kinds of quizzes?

I would imagine that it could be very rewarding to take a poor product, work in depth with the author over time, and turn it into a quiz to be proud of!

For me it's not a matter of preference but a matter of time. If I only have 10 or 15 minutes to spare for editing, I'm not going to jump into a task that will likely take more time than that to write a helpful, detailed note. I often edit from work on my lunch break, so I really do have a deadline for when I need to stop editing and move on to other things.

Yes, it is rewarding when it happens, but unfortunately it often doesn't work out that way.

A willing author who just needs a little instruction and encouragement, who wants to write a good quiz but just doesn't know how - those authors seldom stay long in the "back of the queue" group. We know what effort looks like, and we want to encourage it. It's not really all that hard to write a quiz if an author is motivated - once our requirements are understood, it's just a question of doing it. It's a lot of work, but it's not *hard*. Those authors realize fairly quickly that we really mean it when we say we want the spelling and punctuation to be correct, they figure out how to do research, they start to grasp some of the more difficult concepts like time dependency, and before too long they are writing good quizzes.

The authors who go to the back of the queue on any kind of a consistent basis are those who pay no attention to instructions and guidelines. Who, when given a list of five changes needed to the quiz, make a half hearted attempt to do two of them, for the first three or four questions, and then resubmit. After five or six rounds of that, depending on the soft-heartedness of the editor, the quiz is either deleted, or the editor cleans it up and puts it online. These authors are not interested in learning, and once they fully realize how much work will be expected of them, they leave the site.

The first group are indeed rewarding, and I'd say that all editors enjoy working with them, once they see that progress is being made. The second group is not rewarding at all.

As Lady C said, time is very much a factor, too. Do I take half an hour once a week for six weeks to work on a quiz that won't really be very good even if it does make it online, or do I devote that time to good authors, and to authors who could be good with a little help? It's also depressing to work with people who don't want to work with you - most of us can only take a little of that at a time.

So I guess the answer to your question is yes and no.

So is that where newbie Editors get their start?

There's no better place to start regular editors than in the regular queues. Might as well show them what to expect from the get-go.

As the 'newbie-est' editor here, I have to agree. If I'd started out on single questions, a whole quiz would have then been daunting. Might as well face it head on and tackle it. Not that I think I'm anywhere near conquering all the intricacies of editing and FT in general, but after 16 months I don't feel like I'm in the weeds and over my head any more!

Wow, 16 months. I can't believe it's been that long. It seems like just yesterday I sent a congratulatory "you became an editor" note. :P

I still feel like a newbie after four years!

Somewhere along the way this thread's title was changed. The Re:'s are still to the originator rather than the prior poster.

It's been that way for at least a decade.

I believe it depends whether you write in the Quick Reply box (as I am) or by clicking Reply after a person's post? In any case, it's pretty unimportant.

fwiw they're now all identical

There are posts from 12+ years ago in this thread (aka before I was ever a member here - which was 12 years ago this month). Why did it matter what the thread title and all the responses match? The rest of us understood what the gist of this thread was.

It took time for gtho4 to change all those, and it really wasn't warranted.