Trust and theme updates

In the past week or so, we’ve had to suspend a couple of themes from the directory. Suspending a theme is something that we never like to do. It’s usually more of a last resort type of thing. However, there are times when we need to take a firm stance.

Recently, we started auto-approving all theme updates. Well, it’s not 100% automatic just yet. We’re still having to manually approve them in batches, but it’s a stepping stone to having this done automatically. In the future, we even want to make this a possibility for the initial theme submission process.

The important thing right now is that we’re no longer doing reviews on theme updates.

By doing this, we’re putting a lot of faith in theme authors. We’re betting that you all will continue following the guidelines. For the most part, this has been pretty dang successful.

But, we’ve had to suspend two themes for adding in things that they were explicitly told to remove/change in their initial review. I imagine that there’s a few others we haven’t been notified about yet too.

When this happens, it hurts everyone. It means that the more we see of things like this, the tougher it makes that decision to continue making things even more automatic.

As a theme author myself, I want the TRT to continue putting more trust in theme authors. I don’t want this to be a place where we assume everyone is doing something wrong. I don’t want the team to play the role of gatekeepers to the directory. I don’t think that’s the future that any of us want.

So, please take this as a friendly reminder to not re-add stuff in a theme update that you had to remove in the in initial review.