I would like to ask how long should I wait before my account will be approved? It's been a month but still no notice from their reply.
It takes a long time but certainly not a month. If you have verified your email and phone and still not approved, then you can ask for help in this official Steemit channel:
https://steemit.chat/channel/help They usually approve it in 1-2 days.
I wish it would work as you said. I have personally applied on 13th of January and I am still waiting for my account to be confirmed. Because there is no email address where you can reach out to their support I ended up in that steemit.chat, where I got in touch with some guy who gave me to fill another form with some details (what account name I wanted to register, date and my email) - I have checked this guy seems to be involved into community and doesn't sound like a scam for me, his name is drakos (others told me to contact this dude as well). On that 2nd form I filled in it states wait 2 weeks - 2 weeks passed today and still I don't have my account approved. And yes I tried to speak multiple times on steem.chat with other members and they tell me to wait. Bad side of steemit is that you are required to have an account there to be able to use platform, I get it they might get spam by simply enabling usual priv+pub keys only, but anyway it doesn't stop anyone to simply open multiple accounts if they have money.
I guess it is better to buy steemit account via blocktrades which costs around 20$ at current rate if you are in a hurry to use steem platform. I am just hoping my account will be approved this week, if not I'll have to spam multiple times per day on steem.chat it seems and I ma not even sure if that will get me approved. But in the end I might end up with blocktrades (tho now when btc price went down it costs more to open account at btc and other crypto rate), better they say registration is closed or we don't have enough steem power to delegate or something than saying wait a week for the 1st time.
So I do believe this guy who says he is waiting over a month. Because this is exact situation for me.
I'm curious if this is the same experience for everyone. Have there been any signups lately that got approved and how long did it take them?
If this is happening to everyone, this is not good for STEEM. But if only a select group are getting this treatment, perhaps a short message to inform them that their signups was not approved may be good.
I get it that perhaps the Steemit team wants to limit scammers, perhaps some efficient method to do this can be developed.