09/19 - What do you mean it's only Thursday?!?

What browser are you using? I'm gonna write a short guide for you.

 

I use firefox it seems to work the best. Thanks so much!!

 

Okay gimme like 15-20 minutes to finish what I'm doing and then maybe 15 more minutes to write the mini guide for you.

 

Thanks!! Will do!

 

tfw you wonder why it's been an hour since you have seen new hits. then you remember you set finder to hits most first.

 

motivational alligator

 

!

 

So we have a kitten who likes to play with hair ties just like my big girl! The problem: he peed all over me while we were playing. His poor little butt is sore from me and him cleaning him so often and he's throwing a real big tantrum about it. We ended up having to do a bath because i just couldn't full clean him with a wet cloth, and he acted like I was Satan himself, but we had a bunch of cuddles and playtime afterwards.


He's eating wet food too! Here's a photo of Rou and Lily having dinner together. I figured if he's got enough energy to bite a hair tie he can probably eat and we have success!

 

I use HIT finder and Catcher at times. I'm not doing too bad, I just have to keep plugging on that acceptance rating and HITs.
I saw the post from @surveycub2024 and I seem to be in the same boat, but I've been working hard on mine for a while now.

 

he looks sooooooo skinny! it makes me happy to see him eating and in a clean home with friends and his awesome heating pad! <3

 

@surveycub2024

How to Turk (Mini Guide)

Basically turking comes down to finding HITs and then catching HITs (and then obviously doing them). You can use MTurk Suite extension to do both - finding and catching. So step 1 is install MTurk Suite (you've already done this).

Note: I'm using Chrome and have never used Firefox with MTurk Suite (Firefox version of MTurk Suite is outdated and is no longer supported, but apparently still kinda sorta works), so everything I'm saying here applies to the Chrome version of MTurk Suite, but it should theoretically be about the same for Firefox, but if something is different or doesn't work, then you'll have to either live with it or switch to Chrome. The only important thing to note is that, if I remember correctly, MTurk Suite for Firefox requires you to enter your TurkerView API key manually (the Chrome version fetches it automatically if you are logged in to TurkerView (this website)). So make sure you entered your API key if you're using Firefox, you can get it here for free - https://turkerview.com/account/api/

Now that you have MTurk Suite installed, go to MTurk and press this button at the top of the page



That will open a sidebar with your turking stats and also with 4 buttons: Finder, Catcher, Qualifeye, Tracker. I'll only cover the first two in this post.



Finding HITs

Press the Finder button to open Finder in a new tab. This tab is where you'll see all the new HITs that are being posted on MTurk. Never use MTurk's "All HITs" page, it's garbage, always use this Finder to find HITs to work on.

How do you start finding HITs? Press the giant green Start button up top.

Now it will automatically show you new HITs as they are being posted on MTurk. You can see all the currently available HITs in the "Latest HIT Groups" section (upper half of the page) and your log (history of all the HITs you've seen in this session) in the "Logged HIT Groups" (bottom half of the page).

By default, it will check for new HITs every 1.25 seconds (1250 ms). You can see that setting at the top of the page (called "Delay (ms)"). The default value of 1250 should be fine. This might be different on Firefox, but whatever the default is, it's all good, you don't need to mess with it (at least for now). You can see the "Attempts" number right next to it, it just shows how many times Finder checked for new HITs since you started this session (by session I mean since you opened this Finder tab). You can also see a "PRE" number next to "Attempts". I'll explain what that means later, don't worry about it for now.

See how each row is colored either Green or Yellow or Red or White? That indicates the TurkerView rating for the requester that posted that HIT: green means they usually pay well, yellow means the pay is kinda meh, red means it sucks major balls, white means TurkerView has no information about this requester at all (no one reviewed them yet). You can also see their ratings in icons like this:



The first icon is again TurkerView rating (same as the color of the row, by default). The second icon (the person looking one) is the TurkOpticon rating (you don't really need to pay too much attention to it tbh, TurkerView rating is the main one you should be looking at). But also, see how some HITs have those red circles with an exclamation point? That means that requester has rejected HITs in the past, so you should be careful when choosing to do their HITs, especially when you're a new turker and still building up your HITs Approved number. I would also avoid doing any red-colored-row HITs, since the requesters that don't pay well are usually the ones who are most reject-happy.

Catching HITs

Keep this Finder tab open, don't close it. Now go back to your previous tab with MTurk and in the MTurk Suite sidebar click on Catcher button. That will open a new tab with Catcher. Some people like to open it in a new window instead to make it more convenient. You can do it by right-clicking on the Catcher button and then clicking Open Link in New Window.

This is where you catch your HITs. Keep this Catcher tab/window open while you're turking, just like you have your Finder tab open. Now go back to your Finder tab. Pick any HIT you want to do and start catching it by pressing either O or M on the right side of the HIT row.



O means it will try to catch just one copy of this HIT (good for surveys), M means you want it to keep catching as many of this HIT as it can (good for batches). If the O and M buttons are grayed out, it means you're not qualified to accept this HIT.

Once you press on the O or M, it will add that HIT to your Catcher. So now switch back to your Catcher tab. See how there's now a new line with that HIT? It's trying to catch it (by default every 1 second (1000 ms), that setting is again at the top of the page and the default is fine). You can make it stop trying to catch that HIT by pressing the Stop button next to it, or you can just delete this HIT from Catcher altogether if you just don't want to catch it anymore by pressing the trashcan icon. Ideally you want to try to catch 1 to 5 HITs at the same time, you don't want to have more than 5 HITs "active" in your Catcher. That's because it tries to catch them in sequence, not in parallel - meaning that every 1 second Catcher can only try to accept one of the HITs, so it tries to accept the first one you have, then waits 1 second, tries to accept the second HIT, then waits 1 second, tries to accept your third HIT you have in your Catcher, and then eventually again your first HIT, and so on. So if you have too many HITs running in your Catcher, it will be very very hard to actually catch anything. 1 to 3 HITs at the same time is the sweet spot.

You can see how many attempts Catcher made trying to catch each HIT by looking at the "Att" column in your Catcher, and how many copies of that HIT it caught by looking at the "Acc" column.

Once you catch something, open a new tab with MTurk queue and do the HIT from there. Your Catcher tab must stay open to keep catching HITs, and your Finder tab also must stay open so you can actually see what new HITs are being posted.

It can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to even longer to catch a specific HIT. You'll have to learn when to give up and remove the HIT from your Catcher. Don't forget that trying to catch too many HITs at the same time is gonna reduce your chances of catching anything at all.

Adding HITs to Catcher from This Forum

Sometimes you want to add a HIT that you see posted on this forum to your Catcher so it can try to catch it. In the post with that HIT, right click on the word PANDA, then press MTurk Suite -> Create Catcher (once). That will add it to your Catcher.



Settings

You can change various settings in both Finder and Catcher to suit your preferences (like for example, only show HITs you're qualified to accept in Finder, or stop it from making noises when it sees a new HIT, etc). I'm not gonna cover them here, you'll have to just experiment yourself.

One interesting thing to note - you can bookmark both Finder and Catcher so you can easily open them once you start your browser. However, if you do end up changing any settings in your Finder or Catcher, make sure to re-bookmark them, because the settings are actually part of the link, so if you change your settings, the link changes.

What Are PREs?

MTurk only allows so many requests to its servers before it throws a PRE error at you. That's why you have to have those Delays of about a second in both Finder and Catcher. If you set those Delay values too low, you'll start seeing your PRE number go up, which is bad. So keeping your Finder and Catcher delays at their default values is a good idea, unless you know what you're doing. If your PRE number stays at 0 or is close to 0, you're all good.

Good luck!

 

might be naptime for me. I'm surprised to see so many people here at 10 pm mst best time zone. I hope you guys make $$$ tonight!

 

Follow me to the rice: https://forum.turkerview.com/threads/9-20-fried-rice-friday.5820/