Can't Find Awesome HITs? 10/28 Freaky Friday!

Message from VDX
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If anyones score changed last night (last night ONLY), this is a bug. Looking into changing scores back. No HITs will be sent out today and will hopefully resume on Monday. If anyone is on the forums, feel free to disclose this information.

Thank you

 

Hey everyone! So it's the end of the month, today is the last regular hit! It's been fun, I've enjoyed everyone's comments and rage! I'm going to be swapping the quals and designing the hits, but expect it to come around 2PM EDT. Again, I apologize for the lack of notice, I was at a class this week for work and had virtually no signal and no real access to the forums for the pre-hit notification.

Expect a post about the hits on Monday to come at some point today, I'll be playing around with the numbers to see what's possible and what I can do. I don't think I'm going to take donations since it's so last-minute and poorly planned. I'll have to work out a method. Maybe next year we can crowd fund the trick or treat hits, that'd be neat.

The same info about the hits, quals, etc. as I've been posting over and over is contained in the spoiler below, as well as the password for the qual and the link to the qual test.

Spoiler

As you may have heard (or may not if you live under a rock), I will be doing my Trick or Treat hits again this year. Why? Because last year was awesome and I want to do it again, don't judge me.

For those who have never participated, I've spoilered a description below, with screenshots, because everyone got confused and I want to nip it in the bud now.

Spoiler

There are three pages/parts to the trick or treat hit. The first part is this page. Keep in mind, the backgrounds and text may change slightly, I like to change it up. This page basically says to accept the hit, obviously.

When you accept the hit, you get to page two, which you can see an example of here. Because of the way this hit works, in order to return, it needs to be on your continue page. So the instructions here are to go to the hits assigned to you link and continue the hit from there.

When you continue, you will see the last page, example here. This page has a button with Mr Skeltal on it. Click Mr Skeltal and get a trick or a treat. Easy enough right?

"But TJ" you might say, trying desparately to figure out the complexities, "how will I know if I got a trick or a treat?" If you got a treat, you get the hit amount (which I'm setting at $0.10 right now), the hit submits, and everything looks normal. If you get a trick, the hit will return itself. See the Technical Details part to see what that looks like, but basically if you don't see a normal submit, it returned. You can verify that on your status page.

For those who DO know, hopefully you've accepted my qual by now. If not, please do so by going HERE to take the qual test. HOWEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Since I'm doing a bulk thing, PLEASE DO NOT USE YOUR USERNAME! I'm going to be making a script that will check for the password:

36b669382b02cb0473f0517bcf60d9f8

Use this in the qual test, and only this, no other characters. People keep putting return characters in, that breaks my scripts and I have to go in and fix it manually. Please just put that string in, in its entirety, and nothing else.

I've had people express their concern that I'm only active during work hours, and some people can't participate then, so I'll do my best to accomodate. But I can't be doing one-offs at 2am, I sleep, sorry. Because of this, I'm going to run the first batch tomorrow after work hours. Not sure when, but I'll be in class starting at 6:30 EST, so it'll be sometime after that most likely. I'll be posting in all the forums and IRC, so make sure you have your requester ID searches running! this *should* be the panda, but I can't guarantee it.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:

Because this is a controversial hit (it might not seem like it but people get bitter), I've decided to do a few things differently this year. Namely, I'm going to try to schedule at least a little bit more, give y'all some heads up, and to prevent people from winning every time.

This hit is a luck-based hit. I create a random number that is one of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. If the number is 1,2,3,4,5, the hit will *return* (READ: NOT REJECT) itself, someone else can accept that hit. If the number is 6,7,8,9,10, the hit will submit, and WILL approve in 1 minute.

PLEASE LOOK HERE TO SEE WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN YOUR HIT IS RETURNED! I got 800 people asking me about that every day. You will see an "Invalid URL Parameters" error. This means your hit was returned, and you DID NOT WIN. If your hit submitted, you see the normal "Your hit has been submitted to Tjololo for approval" thing.

IF YOUR HIT WAS SUBMITTED: Enjoy your dime. After all the hits have submitted, but before the next hit is live, I will be granting you a qual that will exclude you from accepting a hit in the next batch. After that batch is done, your qual will be removed, and you will be eligible for the NEXT batch. In other words, you can only win once per week.

THE FINAL BATCH: I haven't figured that one out, but it's going to be larger. I've had people offer to pay to make it even BIGGER, and I'll see if that's the direction I want to go. As of right now, I have enough personal funds to make the last batch almost the same size as the whole previous month, so it'll be larger and pay better, though how much of each I'm not sure. I'll have to fiddle with the numbers and mturk's fees. I will only be doing ONE final batch, so if you don't win, sorry. It will definitely happen on 10/31. Not sure of the time though. Maybe I'll do a few smaller batches throughout the day, I don't know. I'll figure it out.

CHEATING:

Cheating isn't cool. I've taken lengths to prevent it, but people still try. Last year I had 3 cheaters. If you cheat, I *will* know about it, you'll get my cheater qual. This qual will be set as "not assigned" for every hit I plan to do, and you will be ineligible forever, so don't cheat. What do I mean by cheating? Trying to force submit, or circumvent the random number, or doing any fancy nonsense to give yourself an edge. If you're that desparate for a dime, I'll give you free access to my couch, take whatever change you want, don't ruin it for everyone else. Seriously, it's not cool. If I had thought about it last year I would have hard blocked the cheaters, but this year instead I'm just going to prevent you from ever working on my hits again.

Unrelated, but here is a short gif of an assassin bug snacking on one of our bees that we found Sunday when doing our inspection

 

I've been posting them all month Might get lucky today!

 

Title: Quick Website Usability Test 3 | PANDA Requester: Jen McDonald [A12C5SHN5HS12O] (TO) TO Ratings: ★★★★★ 0.00 Communicativity ★★★★★ 5.00 Generosity ★★★★★ 5.00 Fairness ★★★★★ 5.00 Promptness Number of Reviews: 3 | TOS Flags: 1 Submit a new TO review Description: Quick Website Usability Test Time: 10 minutes HITs Available: 1 Reward: $0.30 Qualifications: HIT approval rate (%) is greater than 90;Location is US

 

Nvm, was looking at outdated scraper. Ugh.

Every time there's a batch I'm in, I turn off the scraper because of PREs. Once I'm done I'll turn it on but sometimes I forget and think I'm seeing new ones up.

 

Title: Categorization | PANDA Requester: keisuke inoue [AI7DI2V9QG3SW] (TO) TO Ratings: TO Unavailable Submit a new TO review Description: Choose the correct category Time: 60 minutes HITs Available: 211 Reward: $0.03 Qualifications: Masters has been granted

 

I thought VDX said the HITs weren't going out today but I see batches up.