Two months ago I decided to upload my very first paper to arxiv.org. As I'm not associated with any research institute, the process has been pretty painful. First I had to get endorsed by someone else to be able to submit a paper to a specific category (cs.DC in my case). After getting that sorted out I was able to upload. However, my submission has been "on hold" ever since.

I really wish arxiv.org provided a bit more transparency here. Why is my submission "on hold"? How many submissions are in front of me? What's the ETA?