You may have seen that we are not so many moderators and we are not organized between pure forum moderators, torrent moderators, report moderators and helpdesk moderators. We are too few and even can't assure availability around the clock to have such split. Most moderators do multi task: forum, approval, reports, helpdesk.
So when for example I am working on torrent approval, and a Report drops in, I stop approving and look to the report and treat it if needed. Reports are meant to bring infractions to our Rules to the staff attention, some are crucial for the durability of this site.
Helpdesk requests and Reports generate a notification in all Moderators and Administrators message boxes, so that they can be treated by any Staff member being online to be fast on them. The disadvantage is, they are "spamming" our boxes, indeed.
With the times you give it took your approvals, you are rather lucky. It can unfortunately take longer. We don't like that, but the availability of moderators is too random.
The time it takes me to review a torrent is very variable from a few minutes to more than 30 minutes (badly identified files, suspect for duplicate or forbidden content …). Often when I start to work on approval there are more then 10 waiting. So I may even not treat all before needing to leave.
We treat all torrents pending for approval, first those seed, then those not seed. A PM to a moderator who works on approval will just make him slow down the approval. Even if you get an answer, it will most likely say be patient or give you the thing to improve, which you would have got anyway when it is yours being reviewed in the queue.
Uploaders can help more and speed up the approval, by checking themselves if everything is OK:
- no duplicate
- seeding it in their Profile page
- pictures not lost
- respecting the amount of active torrents allowed
Just to give you an idea, more than 30% of the torrents I review are duplicate. Checking these is lost time and longer waiting for valid torrents.
In my eyes the moderator who indicated 1 hour as the span to consider a PM is not working much on torrent approval (but I may be wrong), because those who do know that unfortunately often there are longer waiting ones in the queue.
We like the uploader very much and try everything to keep approval time as short as possible, be assured of that.
An advise: Make a good row of clean uploads and you will get the Auto Approval privilege granted. You'll no longer need to wait for approval (but will have the full responsibility that ALL rules about uploading are respected)