Knowledge Base: How does a tutorial get listed on the front page?

Here's a breakdown of the current moderation process:

Step one: submit your tutorial

Head on over to the tutorial submit page, submit your tutorial, and you're well on your way!

Step two: wait a day

Once submitted, your tutorial can be rated by visitors and by moderators. There's a 24 hour voting period where everyone comes in, views your tutorial, and rates your tutorial. After those 24 hours are up, we take a look at all of the ratings on your tutorial and make a decision on whether to approve it for Good-Tutorials or not. There's not a hard line that determines whether your tutorial gets approved or not, since moderators' ratings are weighted higher than regular users' ratings.

In rare cases, we sometimes don't have enough people who have rated your tutorial. This could be because you submitted over a common holiday, submitted in a lesser-known topic, or any number of reasons. Rather than trying to guess, we decide to hold off on making a decision until we get more people to rate your tutorial. Once we have that, we can make a better guess at how good your tutorial actually is.

Step three: check your status

Usually, you can sometimes just find out about the status of your tutorial by your own stats: are you getting more traffic or comments today? It might be a good indicator of whether you made the front page on Good-Tutorials.

Another option is to check out your submitted tutorials on your user profile. We recently added tutorial statuses, which means you can check on a per-tutorial basis whether that particular tutorial has been approved, declined, or awaiting moderation.

Finally, you could also just monitor the upcoming queue itself and see if anyone is asking you any questions in the comments, review the ratings you're getting during the moderation period, and so on. While you wait, feel free to browse and rate the other tutorials in the upcoming queue. How other tutorials do has no bearing on whether your own tutorial will make the front page. We don't have caps of "we can only show xx tutorials today, sorry!", so it just doesn't make sense to try to downvote the tutorials around you.