Projects usually go through automatically in a few minutes.

However, sometimes a project will trigger the filters.

If that happens during Californian office hours, it's usually only minutes before it gets through. If you post just as the staff are packing up, though, then you'll have to wait until they are next at work (the next day, after the weekend), allowing a bit of time for catching up with backlogs and muffin-breaks.

And another sort of weird thing... my contest entry was accepted about an hour ago, but it's still not published. That's just bizarre.

Accepted? Or "received"?

There's an automatic email you get just for ticking the box to enter the contest ("received"), and then when a human has looked at it, you get an email from a human saying it has been "accepted" (or "rejected").

PS, don't get me wrong... I'm not griping. I love this site. I do IT Security for a living so I tend to pick up on quarks, that is all :)

Accepted... I submitted it last night around midnight and got the received, and at 1:41 PST got the accepted... but it's still not under the Living category it should be in. Here's the Ible... http://www.instructables.com/id/Manliest-Lazy-Susan-Ever/

It's there - click the living tab above, then the re-use tab at the left.

Yup, it's there now. Same place I was looking at before with a cleared cache and several different browsers. All is right and well in the universe now. Thanks.

That's all good and well... and I don't mind waiting so much, but there is a bit of a bug for the ones that aren't instantly published. When you use the share feature to throw it up on Facebook... it doesn't appropriately publish the correct amount of detail on Facebook... it doesn't show any intro text or thumbnail... just a link that looks like SPAM or a hack, so one has to wait until it's officially published on Instructables before coming back and using the share feature. That's kind of annoying, not a huge deal, but something I would imagine wouldn't take a lot of tinkering to solve by the devs.