Hey Andrea,
Thanks for reaching out. To address your concerns in reverse order, there are unfortunately no options for these two things you mention:
The other issue I am facing is that I would like to show the author of the event or to set it as default organizer, but I don’t find either of those options.
This may be possible with some custom coding. While we cannot help with custom coding, I may be help later on after we figure out the issue with the submission statuses first.
In regards to those issues:
1. Can you confirm that when you say, “submissions end up in the to be reviewed pile”, you mean that their status is literally set to “Pending Review”? Is it Pending Review, or “Draft”, or something else?
2. Can you post your site’s complete system information to this thread? Here is how → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/