Hi folks, I just did a bunch (about 100) of HITs for ProdUniverse under the task of product categories. I dilligently referenced their categories sheets and provided comments regularly when the product was in the wrong category (ie giving the category the product should be in according to their guidelines). Sometimes if I was unsure I would comment with my opion of another possible category, as in where I would look for the product if I was shopping for it (which is what they ask you to inform your ratings with in the guidelines). They have so far rejected all but 4 of my HITs. Not only will I not get paid for work I did, but my rating is being destroyed because of this! YIKES! Help?! Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone have any insight into what I might be doing wrong?
I did about 200 and almost all were just rejected....this is the first time I've had any rejections from them, I've done hundreds in the past too..........I only had 22 rejections out of over 300,000 now I have over 200..........great.....
I have had 194 of yesterdays Prod Universe 4 cent hits reject so far. Prior to this I had a 99.8 accuracy rating. Many of the hits I did were on books+magazines. The image was a yellow box that stated “Picture not available”. On these specific hits, I answered “no” to the question “Are you able to see the product image?” I am thinking that because the box was not completely blank that Prod Universe system is thinking there was an image. I have done many of their hits in the past without any problem so I think it may be a glitch in their system. I sent an email to Prod Universe yesterday but have not received a response yet.
what an interesting trend Interesting that others are having similar experiences. I said that i did see the images for the books and magazines with the yellow box and I still got rejected. maybe its something else. I wrote to them also and asked for insight as to why my HITs were rejected. at least it would be a learning experience! thanks for sharing, I feel a bit better now id i like to hear how it turns out for you all, likewise i'll keep you posted.
same here i did over fifteen hundred and almost 130 rejected so far and none approved. Hope this some kind of malfunction on their end.Never had a reject before
I just found out my account has been suspended because of this. I am a new turker so this has really affected my rating terribly. These were some of the very first tasks I was doing. I can't believe this! Does anyone know about resources for contacting the Turking Team to dispute the suspension of my account?
Hi All, was just on another Board and Prod Universe is working on the situation, they are very apologetic, I have copied and pasted their message here for you so that you will all sleep better tonight " Re: ProdUniverse « Reply #162 Today at 3:54pm » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hello from ProdUniverse! First off we would like to apologize to everyone who had HITs rejected by us over the weekend. We had an error with our servers that caused all HITs to be incorrectly rejected. We have pulled down all of the remaining HITs in that batch so nobody else would be affected. Right now we are working with Amazon and trying hard to rectify this situation. If you did work over the weekend that was rejected it WILL be approved, and you WILL be paid for it. We understand that many of you work very hard to do your best work on our HITs and we thank you. We also understand how these rejections can have a negative effect on your worker status and that is NOT our intent - we aim to treat every worker fairly, and will make every effort to do so. Finally, please understand that due to the scope of this situation we simply do not have the time to reply to everyone individually - we feel (and hope you agree!) that our time is better spent fixing the problem, reversing the rejections, and paying for the HITs rather than sending individual emails to every worker. We are not ignoring you and we do value your comments. Again, if your work this weekend was incorrectly rejected you WILL have it approved and you WILL be paid for it. Thank you again for all of your hard work! ProdUniverse " again, this was copied from another Board.
I had a bunch of rejections too. ProdUniverse made an appearance at the other turkers board. Here is the link. http://turkers.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=shame&action=display&thread=5761&page=12 They said they are going to fix the problem. I don't know what to say about your suspension except to contact produniverse about the situation, and copy the message from prodUniverse from the other board and send it to amazon, hopefully you can get it fixed.
Yes, pibs, that what you should do. Contact both, the requester asking them to revoke the block (if they had blocked you prior to your suspension) and if they didn't ask them to contact MTurk on your behalf. And then write to MTurk as well, copying the reply they just posted. I hope MTurk will reinstate your account. Use the Contact link at the MTurk homepage. Good luck!
Produniverse is Arrogant! I am an experienced Mturker. I worked on Produniverse hits and they rejected half of them. I wrote them to inquire why and no response. I would like to know why they were rejected so I can do a better job in the future.
Hey Tiger, Thanks for the good word. Glad to hear that something is being done about it! We'll see how it goes getting my account back into working order. I feel like there should be a more direct way for turkers, companies, and amazon to clear up issues like this rather than via discussion boards on other sites. not to mention that most HITs pay way below minimum wage if you were to do them for an hour! this seems like an all together unethical way to have labor done, if you ask me. This would technically be considered "piece work" since you are being paid per item, and legally at least in my state (not sure about federally) you have to be compensated to at least minimum wage if your piece work rate is coming out below.....just sayin' i tried this turk thing and I'm not sure its something i'm comfortable continuing with after this whole fiasco! But I guess thats a rant for another thread, huh? Thanks again so much for your helpful reply!
I don't think that it's technically possible to 'approve the rejected HITs' or 'reversing the rejections'. Unless, of course, mturk is planning to assign special treatment to this exceptional (???) case. Yeah, it sometimes makes us feel better to know that we're not the only victim
Yes it is possible. Another requester has done it a few weeks back (I think Jayaram or similar was his name, there is a thread about it here). But requesters have to contact MTurk staff about it and work with them. The MTurk team has posted in the other forum about Product Universe and also about Neel S. Joshi who last weekend rejected so many HITs for no apparent reason. After all, they also don't see any money if requesters mass reject.
That's really great, gotta search for that thread now. Okay, here's the link to that thread: http://www.mturkforum.com/showthread.php?t=1243 Does anyone know if this 'reversal of rejection' feature is available to all the Requesters in general, or is it a special feature/privilege designated to a selected [supposedly high-paying (to Amazon, of course) regular] Requesters?
It's not generally available, and so far I have seen only two requesters who were able to work with the MTurk team to get unjustified rejections reversed - Jayaram and ProdUniverse. It takes a special effort on the part of the requester and supposedly the MTurk tech/software staff, if money is involved I can't say.
Good news, out of the 194 rejections I had, ProdU reversed 174 of them so far, and I have been paid for them as well.
I had hundreds from this requester I had like 4 rejected but don't really know why but most of them went through.
I have Mturking for the past 6 months or so, had been working pretty well with about 98-99 % approval and suddenly out of the blue my account has been suspended. I had previosly been blocked by a few requesters like ProdUniverse and Classify this .Now I just don't know what to do. Can any please help? Thanks