New Requester: Question for Workers

Discussion in 'Requesters' started by Josh Siegel, Feb 10, 2019.

  1. Josh Siegel

    Josh Siegel AATN5Y4RG8H0U

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    Hi all,

    I am PhD Candidate and recently began using MTurk to pretest questionnaires for my research. I have been pleasantly surprised by the high quality responses I have received through MTurk so far :)

    I stumbled upon my own requester reviews on here and I have a question regarding one of the comments made.

    The comment was a complaint that I removed the hyperlink to my Qualtrics questionnaire, forcing the Worker to copy and paste the URL into their web browser. I was advised by colleagues to do it this way as an attempt to prevent bots from accessing my questionnaire.

    So, I am hoping to get some advice from you all regarding this. Is it a big hassle to copy and paste the URL manually? Do you think I am actually doing anything to prevent bots from completing my questionnaire instead of real people? For future work, should I insert the hyperlink?

    Many thanks! :)
     
  2. t0nja

    t0nja Survey Slinger

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    Hi!
    Personal I do not have a problem with manual imputing the URL, but I use chrome, so all I need to do is just highlight the link and right click, which will give me the option to paste and go to the website for me.
    I do not find it a big deal or a inconvenience at all.
    As for if it helps with Bots, I can't help there, maybe one of the ones who knows the system better might be able to help you on that question.

    Have a great day!
     
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  3. angel

    angel Survey Slinger

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    First off there isn't a huge bot issue like was believed a few months back turned out to really be an issue with non native english speakers. I asked on another thread for a link to info about that and will post if someone still has it.

    Second I don't see how that would really prevent bots anyway. That said it is not a huge inconvience but anything that streamlines workflow is appreciated by workers and depending on the length of a link copying can be annoying.

    I just looked at that review and the issue isn't that it has to be coppied and pasted but that apparently it can be clicked on but doing so leads to an error page at which point many workers would just return the hit with out thinking to try copying and pasting the link to see if it worked.

    Edit: Someone shared the link I mentioned above with me.
    https://blog.turkprime.com/after-th...h-data-collection-on-mturk-and-how-to-stop-it

    As a worker and I know I am not the only one we are frustrated by all this talk of bots, While I'm sure there are a FEW out there it is not the issue it was made out to be a few months ago
     
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  4. Josh Siegel

    Josh Siegel AATN5Y4RG8H0U

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    Great! Thank you for sharing this! I am not sure how that user was even able to click on something, but I see the point that you have made. In the future, I will just leave the hyperlink in.
     
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  5. angel

    angel Survey Slinger

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    Glad we could help and thanks for reaching out to workers.
     
  6. rater9

    rater9 Survey Slinger

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    Hi Josh!

    The way you are putting in your links for the greater majority of users is not a problem, perhaps a very minor annoyance but nothing that is going to make or break anything monetarily. One thing that is a bit of a challenge as far as I am concerned is the ability to use accessibility software and/or an on-screen keyboard that does not allow for easy cut/paste or copy/paste of the link. I know that this is more of a challenge for me than say 99% (?) of Turkers overall, but if I am able to get past the issue, I would say those making complaints need to chill out and spend the extra second and be happy they aren't trying to "tell" the computer where that link is on the page etc... :cheer:
     
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  7. DarkChild

    DarkChild Survey Slinger

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    Just want to solidify this because I've been talking about it a lot lately.

    You're not actually trying to prevent bots as much as you're really trying to prevent random responses. From being a part of these communities for a good while now, I can tell you that the workforce does not have open access, knowledge, or resources to make something as complicated as a bot that dynamically does surveys for them and requires MACHINE LEARNING. It's such an odd thing for me to see continually coming up when every day I see people having trouble with simply installing chrome extensions, or learning to accept jobs correctly.

    There are certain automation tools that can be used to click, and pre-programmed to do things for you on the web, but I've only seen it brought up one time by an advanced user, and to get it to be functional dynamically in all situations would be so much more trouble than it's worth, and the set up alone would be vastly beyond the skillset of someone who is willing to work for pennies and dollars on the platform every day.

    Simple attention check questions throughout the survey will do absolutely more than enough to tell you if a worker is randomly responding or not. A requester should never need more than that. There are not thousands of workers that possess an army of bots like what is proposed. There are just certain people who either don't understand English and are randomly responding, or are just randomly responding because they're scamming you.
     
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  8. A6_Foul_Out

    A6_Foul_Out Organic Meme Panda TurkerView Masters

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    Most experienced workers will use something like https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/4255-linkify-plus-plus which makes the non-hyperlinks a complete non-problem.

    Interesting insight to know that this is actually intentional though.

    But yeah, no bots on the platform -- just a very small percentage of non-english workers scamming. If I had a bot capable of fooling a researcher of a proper survey completion, I wouldn't be using it for survey completions.
     
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