turkopticon problems?

Ditto

Yeah I'm having the same problems, between getting messages that the site itself is harmful and the Chrome extension not working (always refreshing and never stopping). Does anyone know whats going on with the site and service?

 

Hi I got this information from another site here is what is going on with it.

Hi everyone -

Sorry, I have been monitoring the other thread on Turkopticon and didn't see this until someone send it to me yesterday.

Let me apologize for all the confusion. Keep in mind that we are people who are doing this in our spare time for free to make Mturk better.

There have been a few things that have been brought up here.

1) Turkopticon as an attack site: We host turkopticon on differenceengines.com, which is a separate site so that our costs are kept down. It turns out that people put spammy comments on that site advertising malicious sites. As a consequence, Google's automated algorithm tags differenceengines as an attack site. The easiest solution for this is to move turkopticon to a new server, but we need some time to do this. This has not occured because we collect data. I wouldn't be surprised if some dodgy requesters are behind this.

2) Data collection - The Turkopticon FAQs and all of my posts have mentioned that we collect anonymous data because we are trying to get a wage measure and a measure of rejected work. This seems like the most important way to make sure that requesters compete on wages and treat people fairly. As everyone has noticed, we just don't have the man power (we are all doing this for free) to review the reviews and wages seemed like a more accurate measure.

In order to get wages, we need to capture how long people work at the job. The problem is that workerid is not displayed on all pages, whereas workername is. We still keep workername anonymous by "hashing" the workername once it is sent to Stanford (this is a process where a workername is converted to a bunch of numbers and letters than I cannot convert back to a workername). I do this once it is sent to Stanford because it is easier (and faster) than doing it before it is sent. However, I will try to make it happen before the data is sent so it is more clearly sending anonymous data.

There has always been a setting (mentioned in the FAQs) at https://www.mturk.com/mturk/turkopticonsettings to stop sharing data. Of course, if you stop sharing data, we won't be able to calculate wages.

3) Site slowdown - I advertised Turkopticon on Turk recently (and sent out emails to past workers). This has tripled our userbase in a week. The servers that send the reviews are just overloaded. The problem is actually not the data collection - that request just goes and does not require any information back. The problem is that Turkopticon.differenceengines.com is taking a long time to get people the rankings. Again, this is a server issue. Again, keep in mind that we fund this out of our own pockets, so it is not so easy to get a high powered server.




I just changed Turkopticon to stop displaying rankings until we can sort this mess out!


I apologize again - we thought that getting more users and figuring out wages would be a great way to change the market for the better. Turns out that more users slowed everything down and we should have been more clear about the data we were capturing.
Ned

 

Best if you read the whole thread over at the Turker Nation forum. It's called "Petition to restore Turkopticon".