As many of you know, the queue is extra busy this time of year. People begin to get out of school and start updating their stories on a more consistent basis. Great for all of us readers who have been waiting ages for those updates (Noblevyne…where is the next chapter of NFA??) but not so great for those of you waiting in line to have your story validated.

Site policy is that is can take up to 10 days to have your story validated. While it rarely takes that long, we do regularly get to seven or eight days. Unfortunately, most validators have additional site responsibilities (not to mention real life) that cuts into the validating time. For instance, answering trouble tickets. Trouble tickets are the method by which you can ask questions directly to the site and have them answered by a staffer that is online at the time.

The system is hosted separately for a variety of reasons but one of which is to help keep site traffic running smoothly. What this means is that to answer trouble tickets, a staffer must go to another site, log in to another site, open a screen to view all current trouble tickets, open a single trouble ticket, read it and then post an intelligent (or at least somewhat intelligent) response.

Now, here’s where I make my plea to all of you wonderful people who take the time to read this….please do NOT send trouble tickets saying your story has been sitting in the queue for over ten days. We have a counter on the queue…we know how many days we are behind and, so far, we’ve yet to hit over 10. So, every time we must answer a trouble ticket saying the story has been waiting for over ten days (when, in truth, it’s only been 6 or 7) it’s a bit frustrating. But that’s not the important part. The important thing is that every time a staffer has to answer an erroneous trouble ticket is time spent away from the queue….meaning by trying to prompt us to hurry by lodging a ticket you are actually slowling down the time we could be validating your stories.

Please, please, only lodge a trouble ticket if it has actually been ten days (yes, we know exactly when you submitted) and you have already checked your account to see if your chapter was rejected. It will help us move faster and get all that great summer reading up on the site for you even quicker. Note that we will no longer be responding to trouble tickets that regarding validation time unless it has truly been longer than 10 days but will simply refer you to this post. Happy writing!