I've been doing more and more HITs over the past few months and have gone from MTS to Pandacrazy and Hit forker. Seems to me I was able to catch more hits with PC and HF. So I've found a popular requester who does transcribing videos and all the HITs are submitted under new group id, so never possible to Panda the hits. The hits are gone immediately, regardless how fast I refresh or if I'm able to click the HIT inside the mturk page itself. My question is, with hundreds or thousands of people using the same script, is it literally the lowest latency connection that will always be catching these hits? If so, do I stand no chance? The search feature is unable to catch the hits fast enough. I think the only way I'm able to catch this requesters hits is if I panda every single new hit on HF and someone else who caught it returns it or doesn't complete on time. These hits seem to pay well and I'd like to try them but it's impossible for me to catch. Any help would be appreciated, I just need to know if I'll have a chance or not.
I should start by saying I've never used Pandacrazy or Hit forker. That said, a quick google search seems to suggest that one can set the program to search by requester rather than by job (and set pandas in this manner). I would play around with the settings and see if you can figure out how to set that up... Perhaps using the requester ID in place of the group ID? I wish I could be more help but all I can tell you is that google seems to say it can be done. Edit: I did find this apparent 'walkthrough' but im not sure how current it is and make no claims to it's veracity. Everything below is a quote, and none of the information comes from me.: "Put the Requester ID in and switch it from 'panda' to 'search' and then save. Then put it on a delayed ham. You can see the color slightly changes when you have your panda on a requester search. This will keep it searching for any HITs from that requester (will catch and search again). "
Thank you, I did not mention but yes I have tried this. It seems by the time the search finds a job it's already taken I've tried lowering the timer on pandacrazy. Even if I once/panda the job as soon as it appears on hit forker it's gone. I'm not sure if its just latency and luck or if I'm competing with multiple thousands of scripts and they are just catching the hit before me. Honestly feels like I will never have a shot to catch these hits.
Unfortunately that's just a very inconvenient way for that requester to publish their hits and I don't know of a good solution to catch those kinds of things. The search function on PC isn't particularly efficient (it has to see the hit before it can start the job to catch it) but there really isn't a good way to catch something like that if you don't know the group id ahead of time.
Okay, thank you. Wish I could do more, seems like ultimately it is down to a battle of latency and timing among a mass number of people I'm getting better at finding decent hits and time management on mturk, I've still yet to find good batch work or those lucky hits people seem to make decent money off of. I'm hoping at the 5k hit mark some more things will be available to me but when browsing the hits i dont see that many requesters with limitations of >5k. I see those reddit posts of people making $50-100 a day and I cry inside, lol.
