In some cases that must be true, but not this one.

Patience is a virtue that I must cultivate.

Sometimes my quizzes take weeks, even months, in preparation. I don't expect an editor to place them on-line immediately... I don't really care if it takes weeks before they make it on-line :-)

What I would like to be able to do though, is have more than one quiz submission at a time. When I'm on a roll and the creative juices are flowing, its very frustrating to be held back haha

This is what I was going to come back to recommend; it can save a lot of time to just have submissions ready to go.

Even if you can only have one templatesubmitted at a time, you can still keep writing. If you write your quiz as a Word document, then it can easily be copied and pasted into the template when you are able to set up the next one. You can even have several on the go at once!

When I first started writing quizzes I would always write directly into the template. Now I have more experience I do tend to write into a Word document and then copy/paste to the template. It does give more flexibility that way and it means that I can select the order of questions to give the quiz a feel of flowing more smoothly... That's the theory anyway!

Hi, I submitted a quiz on Sunday night and was wondering what's happening to it (it's a constitutional amendments quiz, by the way). I know I've mucked up big time with my previous ones but I thought I would've heard something by now.

Apparently, the quiz queue is big enough (or the editors are taking their time) that it takes a while longer than might be expected to check a quiz.
I've had a (resubmitted) quiz in the queue since December 6 and haven't heard anything back. However, I know the editors are doing the best they can and that the queue may be longer than expected.

Waits of up to a week before hearing anything are quite common during busy times. (Busy both in terms of the number of people writing quizzes and in the festivities of the season impinging on editors' time.) This is even more true for quizzes in specialized categories, which may be left for the specialist editor to look at. And resubmissions will usually be left for the original editor to handle - if they are too busy with real life to have as much editing time as usual, that can slow things down. The Rough Queue Sizes chart in Quiz Author Central will give you an idea about the number of quizzes currently queued in various categories and how quickly they are being handled, but it is only rough.

There is no substitute for patience; asking about it doesn't speed things up. "Are we there yet?" from the kids in the back seat doesn't make the traffic clear so the car can go faster.

I should probably add that having had serious issues in the past with your quizzes does tend to slow the process down, as noted in the guidelines.

When are the busiest times, and when are the least busy times (if it is possible to find any easily describable pattern)?

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?