Continued from Part 2. The worst part of this Amazon has some special forums for developers, and one is devoted to Mechanical Turk API issues. Two months ago a developer using the name mobiciousmatt posted about a problem he was having problems with bots cheating his HITs. I don't have any tolerance for bots either, but listen to what he says (all emphasis mine): Yep. Apparently if you get blocked twice, Amazon may remove your account. While in most cases, the accounts being blocked are cheaters and bots, there's always a possibility you could be blocked by mistake. And if you don't get your first block removed, and get blocked again, then Amazon may ban you from Mechanical Turk completely. If you don't appeal, or they ignore you, then any money in your account will be gone. As mobiciousmatt learned, even honest workers are afraid to work for requesters who have a history of blocking. And, unfortunately, they should be until Amazon decides to take worker concerns more seriously. Wrapping up (finally!) If you've gotten this far, you deserve a medal for your patience and stamina. You've also shown yourself to be someone who cares about worker rights. Even if you haven't been personally affected by the blocking system (yet), I encourage you to send Feedback to Amazon and let them know you are concerned about issues like these which have the potential to hurt honest people -- not only workers, but even the requesters whose money makes MTurk possible. Feel free to send Amazon a link to this series if you'd like. You can also make a difference by joining in the global conversation about MTurk in fine places like this. You don't have to write long-winded treatises like I do, because even a small note here has the potential to help many others. Perhaps the words we write now will influence for the better the way Amazon chooses to operate in the future. MTurk is still a diamond in the rough, but with some refinement has the potential to be truly great. Whew! My fingers are out of breath now.
i appreciate the time you're taking to explain things to us turkers. i really hate the paranoia around the subject and it makes me reluctant to speak up. signing up with mturk i never imagined there would be any reason for them to be suspicious of people willing to work for pennies, but there you go! a few months ago i got blocked from 'ask a question' with a warning that i was submitting formulaic answers, er questions. i don't know if they were implying i was submitting automated responses or what. i did reply to them, assuring them i am in no way savvy enough to do any such thing. [besides the absurdity of accusing me of 'formulaic' answers when obviously questions follow the formula of who, what, when.... well, you get the idea.] anyways, i can't help but think i was blocked because i did 'too many' of their hits - as many as 'many 100's' in a day's time. thus, reaching their tax threshhold. if this was the case, i would have far preferred they had told me this. meanwhile, i took my turking skills to other, more lucrative turking tasks. [i did see your other recent thread on 'maxing out' on hits with requesters...hope this isn't the case with others]. please keep up the good work and maybe one day we'll put a face to this faceless interface.
Thanks, Mischa! I definitely don't want to come across as a Negative Nancy when talking about MTurk, but I strongly believe workers deserve to know the possible pitfalls they may face. As we see with mobiciousmatt above, Amazon not only withholds helpful information from workers, but from requesters as well. I'm absolutely certain that when most requesters hit Block, they have no idea they might be putting a good person one step away from being banned from MTurk. As far as the "Ask a Question" HITs go, those are run by Amazon itself, so if you contact them about it I think they definitely owe you an explanation. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask them to explain what was too formulaic about your submissions, or what was wrong with doing a lot of HITs. After all, those HITs should only take a short time to do, so of course people who like them will do a lot. One time I did a whole series of photo retouching HITs for Amazon which took a lot of time, and the next day found out they'd all been rejected saying they were the wrong size. After double-checking my work, verifying that every single picture met the stated requirements of the HIT, I wrote them asking for an explanation. The person at Amazon responsible for the HITs took a look at them again and discovered she'd viewed them with the wrong program, which made them look squished. She said she'd rejected everyone else's HITs for the same reason, and apparently it never occurred to her that she might be doing something wrong. Anyway, I did finally get paid around $150 for my work, and I hope that everyone else who was wrongly rejected got their money, too. Thank goodness Amazon didn't have the Block function back then. I'm pretty sure Amazon doesn't care about US workers reaching the tax threshold, as I've done more than $600 of work for them in a year and they didn't seem to mind that it meant some paperwork. Also, as far as I know, limiting isn't the same as a block, but now that you bring it up I realize I should confirm that. I'd hate to think that people could get blocks on their record just because some requesters don't want to be bothered about extra tax work.
What I want to know, is where anybody gets off keeping money a worker has earned, whether blocked or not? If a person worked as a secretary, and suddenly the boss decided he/she wasn't working out and needed to be laid off, the boss would still be required to pay his employee for time served, so to speak. Otherwise he'd be in court! See, these are the kind of blunders that are going to get mturk shut down for good. That would be a real tragedy for me. I'm not getting rich here, but at least I can squeek by on what I get from mturk and my child support arrears. Until I build up my own business, this is all I have.
Just make a google search with the words mturk block. See the results you get. I feel we should ask Amazon to put a representative here, to listen to our problems or suggestions. We might see some change if our ideas and suggestions are conveyed to them.
They may be able to pass the buck on some things, but they're in far too deep with others. Besides unfair practices as described here, Amazon is setting itself up for some serious backlash through the operation of broken HITs like Are These Things Different (my pet peeve), which regularly reward cheaters while punishing the innocent with false rejections and withheld pay.
AMEN!! I'd like to know a little background on the person/people who set up mturk in the first placed. Because from where I'm sitting it definately wasn't a "worker." Andy is right--it's the requestors who make the real money.
Andy, you should send Amazon an invitation to put their rep here. We keep on exchanging ideas and suggestions, but without conveying them to mturk, we are not likely to see any solution emerge from this mess. If they are ready to hire Ergo, that would be best, but if not, they can have someone visit this site daily and get some feedback.
I agree with sonica. It would be in amazon's best interest to hire somebody to handle these issues before we all get hurt!
Hm. I didn't know that. I've been blocked by CardCow. But, I've never done any work for them. It didn't bother me really until now. So, if perchance I get blocked again I could get banned? Yikes! So, how do you contact a requester that doesn't have any HITs up? I'm going to have to take care of this. I appreciate this.
First of all, I hope it's not possible to get banned from being blocked too much by requesters that block a whole lot of workers A block is an individual requester's decision to disallow you from their work. Some requester think it's an easy reverse qualification system--but they should not be using it that way. It's very odd if you haven't done work for someone to be blocked by them. So in the chance you've done work, somewhere before is pretty good. To check, and to message a requester you've done work for, look though each day and each page in your Account Status page. If you click on a requester's name on those pages, it will allow you to send them a message. Of course you could try out my program, to see if you did work for them in the past 45 days without going manually page by page. Anyways here's a link to easily message Blackcow: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/contact?requesterId=A2940PLDMHBJ9I&requesterName=Cardcow&subject=
I think that one of the biggest problems is that anyone can use amazon requester inc. To block a person. I have a block from them but every hit I take I can work on them. I don't know which one blocked me. Is it fair to hide behind such a general name no? Have I tried contacting amazon about it yes. Where has it gotten me no where. I think if I have done over 8,339 hits and I only have 16 rejections. I am not that bad of a worker. I of course keep that up by doing a lot of the easier hits also. I do a lot of the .01-.09 hits I don't discriminate at all doing any of these. I go for the higher ones also. If they are going to block they should have the guts not to hide behind the companies name like the one that has banned me from working on their hits. I refuse to do any of the amazon requester incs. hit's any more. I try to avoid those with all my heart and soul. I have been doing this for about 2 months now. Blocking should be allowed by us worker's for the scammers, spammers and such. We should have more rights where we can automatically remove the requester if they are going to abuse the system. I had 15 emails somehow sent from my email address with it labeled as couldn't send due to unknown sender. It just happened and whoever did it is a requester and I am highly upset that this happened. which requester it is I am not sure. I have looked on some of the sites and been sticking with the same ones I have done for months at a time. There were a few new ones. Am I upset yes. I sent the email to amazon we will see what they say.
Nope. I've not done a single piece of work for them. I took a "qualification test". It was hard because I couldn't see everything on the card. I was granted qualification anyway which was weird. Card Cow HITs were no longer shaded. So, I clicked on one and it said I was blocked. I think they blocked me for not doing a good job on their qualification. I don't understand. Instead of blocking, why not just take away qualification? So, I did the qualification test again and magnified the Card on it. I think it was one word I got wrong. I can't remember because it was a while ago. But, I submitted a second time. The second time I know was perfect. I never heard anything and I'm still blocked. I emailed them two days ago and haven't heard anything back. It's rare you ever get a requester to reply to an inquiry. But, if I don't hear from them soon I'm going to go to Amazon. I'm 100% sure I have not completed one HIT from them. So, I shouldn't be blocked. Even if I didn't do their qualification right, they still should not block me. I'd understand not giving qualification. But blocking?
Now don't get me wrong here, but IMO the Requester has the right to block anyone he/she might wish. There's no restriction on blocking a Worker and there shouldn't be. Additionally, if a Requester blocks a Worker, it should be left to the Requester whether he/she wishes to let the Worker know the reason for doing so. If the Requester is kind enough, he/she will provide the reason; but if he/she doesn't, then the Worker should simply ignore that Requester and move ahead. If I were you, at the most, I'd have contacted the Requester and asked for the reason. But if I didn't get a response from them, then as mentioned above, I'd just ignore the Requester and move ahead. I won't go to Amazon for this. Despite this, that's worth a try. Yet, I feel that their reply will be something that would direct you to this part of the Participation Agreement (section 3. - f.): If I've a HIT/HITs that I feel is/are wrongly rejected by a Requester, then I may contact Amazon after I've contacted the Requester and fail to get any response for a long time. Still, I won't expect that this step of mine would be fruitful as I can predict what their reply would be. Yet, I may give it a shot. If you haven't already guessed what I expect their reply would be, then it'd be nothing else but just something similar to what I've quoted above. I surely don't expect everyone to agree with me here, but I'm just expressing my opinion and my thoughts. I've no intention to offend anyone or get into a debate. For the time being, I don't wish to justfight
WOW! I've been at this 5 days and have made a whopping 6 bucks! That almost pays for one used book on Amazon. I must be doing something wrong.
another necro to a thread. suppose its an attempt to revive a dead forum lol but once you are paid for your turk it goes into amazon payment. you never dont recieve your money youve been paid out for.
I had completed 53 hits for a requester, user453, and the next day found that ALL of the hits were rejected. I contacted them and told them that I completed the hits properly according to their instructions and reminded them about Mturk forums and Turkopticon, where workers communicated with each other about bad requesters. I threatened to report them as a bad requester and also sent an email to Amazon Mturk, complaining about this requester taking quality work and rejecting it so they didn't have to pay. I got an emailed response from both the requester and Mturk and was told that there was a glitch in the system that caused all the work to be rejected and that it would be repaired and I would be paid within 48 hours. Lo and behold, it got fixed and I was given my money.