I recently submitted an ad (monday) and its status is marked "new." I think perhaps it is taking awhile to approve since the provider doesn't have any other reviews up but I'm not sure and wanted to know if anyone else has any experience on this matter.

First of all I assume you meant that you recently submitted a "review" not "ad." In the past they were almost always approved within 72 hours, and many times much much faster. I have had reviews post in less than 7 hours. However two things come into play now. First, the fact that she is new without any reviews and you are also new with only one reivew, they may take longer to post it. The other thing is with all the recent changes at TER, the admin is having to do a lot more work besides reviewing reviews, (moderating boards, etc.) so there may be a backlog. There were several recent threads on the GD board about reviews taking much longer than usual, and these were from guys with lots of reviews, so the newbie factor doesn't come into play. If you just submitted yours on Monday, you didn't even reach the 72 hour stage, so be patient. Some of these other guys mentioned 4 to 5 days. I would say if it doesn't post after about 5 days, to contact TER and follow up on it.

I submitted it last week. I've been around awhile, so I can remember when it took a week to a review approved, and just a little while ago I had a review approved in minutes.  There was a thread on the RO board about the unbeleivably short time (minutes) reviews were being approved. Those reviews were called "robo" reviews. My advice, don't worry about how long it takes. Continue to write reviews, you're contributing to the community

It means that someone over there is actually reading and critically assessing your review.

For a while, reviews were going up in hours, if not minutes, but that lead to a lot of very bad reveiws going up, some with compromising information like the names of hotels they were at, etc.

Also, many of those reviews had so little information as to be worthless.

It may be somewhat exasperating to wait days and days for your review to appear, but in the end it is more important to have honest and useful reviews.

This is one change that I applaud the new owners for.

Lately, it has switched to 'who knows?'  I submitted one the other day and it got posted in about 8 hours.  Never had one of mine go up so fast.

Swim