This would be a feature suggestion that would only be applicable to authors. I noticed that if you still have stories pending for approval and publishing, you’d get a popup window at login notifying you about it. I wonder if it would be feasible or make sense to maybe add to that message box some info about your story’s position in the approval queue (e.g., “There are X stories in line ahead of your submission pending approval”). I don’t know how the story review process works or is managed amongst the reviewers and moderators (huge thanks and thumbs up for all of you who work hard to triage through all of our submissions by the way!), but it’s just an idea that popped into my head that might help some authors who might be more anxious to see their work posted to better manage their expectations of the timing.
As a new reviewer, I can say that the queue position isn’t a true reflection of when a story will be reviewed.
I’m aware that at times, some series get sent for approval at one time (all chapters at once), and there maybe something that the author needs to update/fix in the earlier chapters. This leads the later chapters being in limbo (waiting for review) until the fixes are main. The later chapters also land up at the front of the queue, but are on hold.
Also, not all reviewers are comfortable reading all topics (I’m not ok reading incest themed stories, so I leave those stories to the reviewers who are ok with them). We’re volunteers (and fans) at the end of the day.
I’m very familiar wirh “Queues” (Working in a customer contact centre) and agree to Gaz. The position in rthe queue doesn’ indicate anything to the author.
For example:
If my (german) story is on 1st position, but Martin - who is the only one to approve german - is sick or on vacation. I’ll have to wait. While my english Version of the same stoyr will be published a fes days earlier.
Thanks for your insights.
I figured it’s probably not always a straightforward processing line. As I noted, it’s just an idea that popped up to me. It’s just a mere suggestion I’m throwing out here. If it’s not feasible or practical or pointless to show such a piece of info, then I’m fine just letting it go.
First of all, thank you for the suggestion. I totally understand where this idea is coming from, and that authors are sitting there, wondering when their work is finally going to be published.
The other posters in this thread have already made a great job explaining why this isn’t easy to implement, or why it wouldn’t help as much as you hope.
One thing that gives an author a bit more control over the whole publishing process is the new “Publishing Date” feature that I’ve just added. See here for details: Site Updates Pt. 2 - #146 by Martin
Thanks for responding, Martin. This idea was also just partly inspired by some of the discussions I’ve seen on other threads where some authors felt the wait for their story to publish was getting longer and they didn’t know what to expect. So I thought this might be something that could help inform them better. But as the others have explained it very well, I totally understand that it’s not that obvious and straightforward to indicate that detail.
For me, I’m personally not too concerned about the wait for my story to come out. I appreciate that it’s yourself and a team of volunteers reviewing all of the submissions on your spare time, but I also never waited more than a few days for my story to show up on the site. So no complaints at all from me! 
The “published date” feature is an good alternative to better manage everyone’s expectations on the publishing timing. Hopefully that will be useful for those that want that insurance on timing.
I abolutely understand, that an author want to know, when is story get published.
With the new “planned publishing date” feature, Martin has realised something truely amazing. If you want your srory to be published an a specific weekday & time, you can set this in your admin interface.
The only rule is, the earliest Day of publishing is today +5.