The Trusted Authors Program, which was launched back in April last year has now been closed by the Theme Review Team.
The program was initiated in a bid to lower the burden on reviewers/lead. It was also an attempt to streamline the review process for authors who are consistently able to show that they can produce higher quality code and themes that are in line with the guidelines released by the WordPress Theme Review team. However, after more than a year, the Trusted Authors Program is now closed according to dingo-d’s announcement post in the core channel.
According to the Theme Review Team, the Trusted Authors program did not fulfill the intended plan and has ultimately caused more problem than solving.
Dingo-d has also mentioned some of the core reasons for the removal of Trusted Authors program, which includes:
- Entry criteria were difficult to set, it was hard to maintain consistency.
- Management of the queue required separate reports in trac to be modified via SQL – that was unsustainable.
- Being TA has benefits unavailable for other authors – “how fair is this for everyone” has been commented by many.
Moreover, one issue that came up in a discussion held regarding the removal of Trusted Authors program was the fairness of the admin queue. And another was concerning the review process. Since some authors may get an experienced reviewer and others may get a novice reviewer, it will require another inspection to see if they’ve done a good job. In order to fix this issue, many proposals have been put forward, for instance, pairing new reviewers with experienced ones.
You can contact any of the team leads on Slack, if you have any queries regarding the recently closed Trusted Authors Program.