Improving GraphicRiver

Due to the large amount of files accepted theres no fair exposure on the front page for all so i would suggest the items on the front page to rotate for every refresh or entry there so everyone will have the same exposure! Also i find unfair the right up featured files because the stay a lot longer than other files and usually get more sales than other files do something for it please!

The thing that kept bothering me from sometime now is quality issues. I don’t have any problem with other items. The only problem is that you can see business cards and flyers poorly designed, with no ‘creativity’ (the term which is even coined in author guidelines).

There was a time when I had a number of items rejected due to typography and other stuff. I’ve learned about it as few reviewers really let me knew what was wrong in that. Now I can see many accepted items having the same problems, typography, color themes etc. As I said, I don’t have a problem with my items being rejected at that time, because, in fact that’s why I’ve always gotten better with my items and I can feel it.

However as I said, now when I look at some accepted items I can see the same mistakes for which I was rejected and due to which I became better. I don’t know about anyone else but for me, when such situation arise, I can tell that there’s something wrong for sure.

Also, it’s been sometime since I looked at newer items and the reviewers might have raised the quality bar again. If that’s the case, consider this post a spam.

Raincutter said
The thing that kept bothering me from sometime now is quality issues. I don’t have any problem with other items. The only problem is that you can see business cards and flyers poorly designed, with no ‘creativity’ (the term which is even coined in author guidelines).

There was a time when I had a number of items rejected due to typography and other stuff. I’ve learned about it as few reviewers really let me knew what was wrong in that. Now I can see many accepted items having the same problems, typography, color themes etc. As I said, I don’t have a problem with my items being rejected at that time, because, in fact that’s why I’ve always gotten better with my items and I can feel it.

However as I said, now when I look at some accepted items I can see the same mistakes for which I was rejected and due to which I became better. I don’t know about anyone else but for me, when such situation arise, I can tell that there’s something wrong for sure.

Also, it’s been sometime since I looked at newer items and the reviewers might have raised the quality bar again. If that’s the case, consider this post a spam.

+1 and a flyer and card is not always a bling bling and shiny stuff going on! also i saw some flyer accepted that if you remove the picture behind stays nothing for the buyer to buy!

Edit: And i saw many rip off that reviewers allowed to be sold! and support doesnt do anything and not even reply back to messages

Low Quality items. Flyers & Business Card flood. Please not ‘Always TF’ and Your Envato Elite totally not fair for GR.

- Follower’s section should be limited to a specific number. That means, only a particular number of latest items from each following author should be shown and not all the latest designs. This will allow us to get some of the items from all our followers!

- New items are shown in the home page only for a short period of time. Files getting accepted during the weekends will be affected due to this!

There may be some restriction to the number of items upload in single attempt or in a day. Say 5 or 10 items a day per Author- not 40 to 80

Some thoughts

1. Remove Authors I follow from the home page and make it part of my personal pages. As a buyer I’d go to my section to see what’s new. I’d prefer to see featured items in the spot currently being used for authors I follow or the featured author.

2. Create a authors only area of the site for file review and other items so customers don’t get put off by some of the things that happen there.

3. Monthly Bundle program. http://graphicriver.net/forums/thread/bundle-editions/46931

Again as others have said quality has become inconsistent while some areas of the site are very very hard to get accepted like web elements. But other it seem like they just let anything through. I have seen a lot of spelling mistakes which reflect poorly on the market place and shows a lack off attention to detail by the reviewer, which is again seen in some of the item that are aloud on to the site.

Sevenstyles set the standard for flyers and produced many then people started coping his style and so on but hardly ever improved on it. Reviewers should not be letting files up that are not as good as the existing file available.

I have also seen a number of background files where filters have been used extensively in the making of and can be seen in the final result these sort of flies should not be excepted.

I am not so bother about time on the home page as most of the time my items don’t sell till they are off the main page, I use lot of key words good descriptions and link to my files from many web site. And often when people have big uploads on the front page they are just trying to get a lot of there files up to save uploading one by one , its not like they are going to do it time and time again. But there could be a limit on how many get shown in one day eg 5 on the home page. The only thing that annoys me about mass upload is there are no key words, this should be a requirement.

Next big issue for me is the referrals, we have asked time and time again for more tools, like being able to see where our clicks are coming from, it is in envatos interest to help us bring more people to the sites, I upload my items to a lot of site to link to GR and it would be great if I could know where I should be placing more or less effort, what is effective and what is ineffective.

The featured file are not used well I don’t think, too often to featured files are by popular authors with already high sales on the item. I think this is a bit of a waste. It would be better to expose new authors with low sales but extremely high quality. Also the length of time is too long it would be better to change all 4 each week this would maximise exposure and get more files featured.

I see many files that are rip offs or just plain stolen there should be harsher punishments for any copyright issues, such as first offence 1 month ban, if it happens again account get closed. This would deter people from uploading such files.

With the business card section getting larger and larger by the day it would be better if it has sub sections so it becomes easier to find a design. This could be applied to other areas of the site as well.

Awesome thread. Thanks for this Collis

1 – Lack of staff presence is not so much of an issue. It’s been a pain recently because it feels like authors have been raising the same issues time and time again with zero response. We can contact support though, I guess we were just spoilt a bit when we had Amanda.

2 – Homepage exposure has always been a bit of a luck thing, good files do not need to rely on it – so I don’t think it’s a huge issue. I think the tabs have helped a lot too. However, all authors should be limited to max 5 items on the homepage at any one time. Seems like a simple solution to me!

3 – Quality issues. This is a big one! I feel like qualtiy is inconsistent and actually worse now than it was when Amanda first agreed to raise the guidelines. Also we were told that the marketplace would be cleaned up and older files which do not have sales in the past year and no longer meet quality guidelines would be removed. This never happened.

4 – Sub-categories for popular sections (like flyers and business cards) – I couldn’t imagine trying to browse those sections as a buyer.

5 – A clear defined statement of what you percieve GR to be and where you see it heading. Are we a microstock site or a high-quality assets library (totally made that name up, but you get my point!). I don’t see how we can be both.

6 – Clean up some of the smuttier flyer designs. Most are fine for their context, but some are clearly very cheap and obvious (close up on boobs is not a good thumbnail image!). We had a desktop wallpaper thread a while back where mods removed many of the screenshots for being too rude, the GR homepage is usually worse!

7 – More advertising / traffic!

Having said all that, it’s 10% grievence, 90% awesomeness. GR may not be making anyone super rich, but it’s giving many of us some great opportunities. I was able to minimse the risk enough to leave my full-time job and now work freelance thanks to this site. I also get a number of client leads each week through this site. I love this site!

I also believe that by Christmas GR will have its first Envato Elite author (keep up the good work SevenStyles!). So I disagree that it’s an unfair system to us.