MTurk Cookies & 400 Bad Request Errors

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Yesterday evening MTurk made a change to how the website operates. Now when you accept a HIT the response sets a "cookie" in your browser with information about the HIT (no clue why or the purpose).

This is fine if you accept HITs & submit them all from the exact same browser and the same profile/session. However if you accept HITs in one browser/profile, and return/submit from another one, the cookies will not expire properly and can cause all of your requests to MTurk to be overloaded when sending these cookies to the server.

Right now (as of June 20th, 2019 2PM EST) these cookies have absolutely no purpose other than to break the website functionality of anyone using advanced workflows/scripts, so the suggested solution to resolving the issue w/o giving up your workflow is as follows:

***IMPORTANT*** You only need to follow these steps for the browser/profile you accept HITs from

• In Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and other Chromium based browsers install EditThisCookie from here:
  • https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/editthiscookie/fngmhnnpilhplaeedifhccceomclgfbg?hl=en
  • Be careful with Opera & possibly other non-Chrome browsers, the extension tends to not be up to date on their extension stores so use the Chrome version of it
• In FireFox you can try this but I don't have detailed instructions for it, sorry:
  • https://cookie-editor.cgagnier.ca/
• Right click the extension icon and go to Options
  • 
• From the options click on "Blocked cookies" on the left navigation pane, on the right hand side click "block cookie" and enter a record as shown in the screenshot:
  • 
  • Domain: worker.mturk.com
  • Name: Hit-*
  • Value: any
• Hit ENTER to make sure the entry is saved (there is no save button, enter will save it)

• Use chrome://restart (or just completely close out of your browser & reopen it for other installs) to make sure the changes take full effect

This will prevent MTurk from setting these cookies so if they actually implement some functionality around this at a later date this guide may impair your ability to use MTurk. PLEASE send in a support ticket with MTurk and let them know whatever they are trying to do is a bad solution because even at 25 HITs in a queue they are dangerously close to the request maximum when implementing these cookies and if they append any more information to these things MTurk will be grinding to a halt for everyone.

 

FYI: You need to hit Enter while in the row with the new block to save it.

 

Its safe or not, i was got 400 bad requester error, get some days...

 

I use Chrome only for Mturk, (and Waterfox for everything else.) I usually throw out all of my Chrome cookies regularly. Is it better to use the Edit Cookie extension?

 

Just re-read this. First, Amazon answers support tickets with form letters, so we're really on our own. I once sent them one on another topic.

Since this article was written in June, is anyone having problems because their MT cookies are blocked?

 

@ChrisTurk

 

Hello, I also use chrome and I do the same as you

 

FYI, this reared it's ugly head for me today again

I should add, directions from @ChrisTurk still work to fix this

 

This just happened to me today. Had never seen this before. Just went through all the steps and things and hoping it works.

Thanks for posting this

 

• Right click the extension icon and go to Options.
• From the options click on "Blocked cookies" on the left navigation pane, on the right hand side click "block cookie" and enter a record as shown in the screenshot: Domain: worker.mturk.com. Name: Hit-* Value: any.

 

I've done what you said up above. I have Chrome. But how do you save what you put in. There is nowhere to save the block rules. And I get in and get back in and the info I entered is gone. ??

This is a bummer, every hit I get into says
Sorry, there was a problem with the requested page
I wrote a message to MTurk but I'm not sure it will do any good.

 

Oh, I just read the post up above how to save it so I will try it.

 

There still are problems, I still can't do any hits. I get that message I posted above. Am I having a different issue maybe?

 

This is the whole message I get when I try and do a hit.

Sorry, there was a problem with the requested page
This was unexpected and we are looking into it. Feel free to contact us if this problem persists for you. In the meantime let’s go home and try again.

 

I will try it. I see this when I work on MLDataLabeler:
Sorry, we couldn’t find that page
Strange... the page you were looking for is not here. Let’s go home and try again.

Go Home

 

I have a question. If survey has a broken link should I just feel out the box of feedback or I need to send that and also return the hit?

 

sometimes I click on the [ i ] in the top left corner and message the requester. Some requesters appreciate it and others don't care. Sometimes the surveys are handled by Cloud Research or other platforms and there is little communication. Sometimes I use feedback in the bottom left corner if there is no code but I don't think amazon cares.

 

Bump.

This is still a thing in June 2024. The fix @ChrisTurk described is still working. The edit this cookie extension is on manifest version 2. I'm guessing all hell breaks loose if they don't update the extension and Chrome shuts it down.

 

It is not working now. Is there any other solution, please share it..
Thanks.,