The add-on review process on AMO is fairly complicated, and can get very overwhelming if you need to look at it close enough that you must understand file and add-on statuses. AMO admins, devs, and reviewers are usually the ones who have to worry about this stuff and there aren’t good docs for it.

Since the issue popped up again today, I decided to take a few minutes to create a chart that explains the AMO review cycle from a file and add-on status perspective. If you think this chart is pretty crazy, you should keep in mind it’s a simplified view of the process. It doesn’t take into account developers deleting versions of marking their add-ons as inactive, and a few repetitive connections were left out. Still, it should give a good idea of how add-on and file statuses interact during the review process, and should help admins figure out which status means what (to add more confusion to the mix, AMO has old unused statuses, as well as others that are only used in Marketplace).

Here’s the chart without the notes:

For the real deal, check out the doc.

Is this complexity necessary? Probably. We have two review levels because it allows us to list polished add-ons as well as experimental ones, giving developers and users more flexibility and choice. This in turn makes AMO more diverse and generally a better option than self-hosting.

http://xulforge.com/blog/2014/09/the-complex-amo-review-process/