Hello good people I recently made a new mTurk account and got the following message: Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk, We have completed our review of your Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker Account. We regret to inform you that you will not be permitted to work on Mechanical Turk. Our account review criteria are proprietary and we cannot disclose the reason why an invitation to complete registration has been denied. If our criteria for invitation changes, you may be invited to complete registration in the future. Thank you for your interest in Mechanical Turk. Sincerely, Amazon Mechanical Turk https://www.mturk.com I was surprised to get that message as I thought mTurk was always open to everyone. I did do some initial searching on Reddit and other forums to get some answers and most people replied saying it's a waiting game, but I wanted to dig a little further. I did read NOT to make a new account and try again, so that's out. Has anyone come across this themselves? Would pushing Amazon Support speed the process up? Any advice is definitely appreciated. Many thanks! - Charles D
MTurk does reject applications sometimes. Now, what methods they use of deciding who gets accepted and who does not, I can't say. However, I have heard of this happening to some people before. There have been one or two that were accepted later on. You could try to email them or call if you think that you were wrongly rejected. Sometimes it could be something simple, like them being unable to identify you or something in the application process not matching up or that they simply don't have spaces available at the time. I don't know how responsive they will be, but it might be worth a go, if it's something you really want to do.
Thanks for replying! Ya, I think I'll give it a week and then start weaseling my way through their support maze
My friend came across the same problem when he tried to sign up for Mturk not that long ago and he contacted support to try and figure out why. They sent him a long winded response than can best be summarized as 'Sorry, Mturk is full'. Basically they told him that they already had enough workers in his demographic and so they weren't taking any more at the moment. I don't know if this is true in your case, but it seems they attempt to keep the pool diverse, likely as a way of ensuring the various surveys hosted on the platform have a good variation of data points to work with. They did assure him that he might be able to get in later.
