Hi, I am a worker and requester both. For my job, I make a simple request "Please only do this assignment once; 1 hit per person" but not everyone follows the rules. Obviously they get rejected for that reason, but there has to be a way to automatically disqualify workers that have already done my assignment, right? I know this can be achieved by going through Manage > Workers > Block Worker and just block everyone that has done a HIT for me (since i only have this one job that i post periodically) but it doesn't seem this is the proper way to do it. Any advice here? Thanks
I would make a qualification, or, if you use Qualtrics, I believe that there is a way to block repeats if they are from the same IP address. I would stay away from blocks. They put workers accounts in jeopardy and ruin your reputation as a requester.
Quals are the best way. For instance after your first run you make a qual for the hit and give everyone that did it the qual and make the next hit require that only people without said qual can accept it. Im sure there is a bit more to it than that but I know it can be done because there are people that do it. As Cowfin said there are programs such as qualtrics that will set it up where they read the persons MTurk id and wont let them complete the hit, but I imagine that is expensive and would not be cost effective for someone with just a few hits. The absolute easiest way is to include either a link to a google doc with a list of MTurk ids or to simply list the ids in the body of the hit. Then if you get repeat takers they cant complain when you reject them. I personally try not to repeat hits, but I am not going to waste time keeping track of every single survey that I have ever done and Mturk does not provide a searchable database of completed hits.
My apologies to the OP for moving the thread in the wrong direction. To jTurker, look at this script in the Scripts section of the forum. "mTurk HIT DataBase" it keeps track of the HITs you've done, and tells you if you've done it before you begin.
I have been on the requester side. The easiest way is to put a test on the hit that automatically gives a qual with a certain number. Make the test unretakable. When someone completes a hit change their qual number so they can not retake. Make sure you set it up so only ones with the correct qual number can access the hit and you will be fine. Hope this helps.
The IP address as a unique identifier is pretty meaningless. AMT already provides a unique handle for every worker: the Worker ID
Qualtrics is cookie based, it'll grab the IP but you'll have to cross check it yourself. You can send the link through Turkitron and then it'll either reject the user based on their Mturk ID or forward them to the survey.
I'm going to have to advise against Turkitron, it takes a two or three minutes to load on the workers end.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But, I've seen much simpler way to prevent retakes even without custom quals. Many surveys, once I submit them, it shows "There are no more available HITs in this group. See more HITs available to you below" message. And the survey HIT will be removed from my available HITs list. But, I guess it is still available to other workers, unlike the other 1-HIT-in-a-group transcription like HITs. I think AMT provides some functionality/option in their requester API just to prevent retakes for surveys, which also has the ability to map a single HIT to many workers.
It will pop up again eventually if the requester doesn't take it down. That's the problem. Not people retaking the survey immediately.
My experience is that they either appear as fake availability or they just vanishes. I'm talking about the surveys that shows just 1 HIT available, not the ones that are posted as a batch.
There must be an easy way. I know when I've tried to accept a HIT and can't then I think I must of taken it before. That's ok, I understand. Often I might see a message that I have. Sometimes I get into a HIT and realize I have definitely taken it before. Then I stop and return it. I do my best to be honest. I like the ones where we can search for our mTurk numbers to see if we've taken the HIT already. But those work best when the numbers are in order.
I know this is late but thank you everyone for your responses and advice! It seems Quals may be the best way to go, however, it is something that I generally like to avoid since it's an extra step and I always remember these being somewhat of a turn-off to me as a worker. Fortunately, there are not a lot of workers out there neglecting to obey the "1 per person" rule on my job, but based on the way I just stated that, you can already tell that these guys are the type that are doing it intentionally. The strange part is all of the offenders in my case were from India, so at one point I decided to exclude workers from India and the issue had literally become a non-factor. But at the same time, it took a lot longer to get my jobs completed since it turns out a lot of my workers were from India, and a lot of them were legitimate too.
I don't have anything live at the moment. I only post these from time to time as needed. Next time it goes live I'll post a link here. It's one of those things anyone can do, so that might actually be a good idea =]