Hey all.

I've lurked around here for years. Never tried opening account, but was always trying to keep side hustle info relevant. So, I'd read through your daily thread once a month or so etc.

Anyway, finally pulled the trigger and signed up and was approved a couple of days ago (on a brand new account which I figured was gunna get denied).

I'm not super impressed with the platform. I've seen vids of how it looked a few years ago...and I think it's worse now then it was then. I've gone ahead and installed turkviewer and turkmaster so far. However, I'm not worried about scrips yet, I'd rather learn what the jobs are and how to do them so I know what to queue up for scripts later and not have a bunch of stuff I might end up returning. Like those filling out receipt tasks (never doing those).

The FAQ also has some links that no longer work and just send you straight back to the main faq page....

I've done about 173 hits (over 2 days). 4 rejects out of those..2 totally my fault. 2 I'm not sure about. 107 approved and 62 still pending. Haven't touched it today, because I figured I'd finally come say hello over here. I'd say it's gunna be awhile before I mosey on over to the daily hits thread. Most of my work has been batches - I think I did about 3 surveys. All through the same person (the surveys not the batches).

The one thing I'm impressed with....I didn't except to make as much as I already have doing it. I know I could of gotten lucky with a few of the .40cent batches I was able to do..but for only having 107 approved and being at 10.84 on the account I was kinda surprised.

The only question I really have is about quals. Is there any place to go to look these up at all? I know most of them are made by customers errr cough requesters...so they can setup exclusive batches for people etc. However, like I have one in my dashboard (no clue why this is hyper) that wasn't there day 1. I didn't request it or test for it..it's called "Will Bang" (will I now? lol jkin). Description: Users who have completed qualifying task (so I did try?) Assigned date was yesterday (23rd nov 18). Then request again.

Sorry that paragraph is probably an eyesore - anyway what does all that mean? I know it doesn't necessarily mean I failed. Since I've tested for an I.T. qual (my real world background) and have 100% on it and it still says tests again.

Anyway, thanks for your time if you made it to this point. If not well curses at you...

I'll probably go back to lurking. Hope your Holidays (if you celebrate it) are going well.

 

There's not a nice central place to look up quals unfortunately.

You can watch the daily thread and they usually show up over there. If you click the tools on the left hand side you can set keyword alerts so you don't have to watch it all the time.

Once you get around to scripts you can look at your scraper and see what you aren't qualified for and look to see if it has a test you can take. There's also a script called overwatch that keeps an eye out for qualifications with tests.

The other thing you can do is look on the hits page on mturk and make sure you have the box unchecked that only shows hits you are qualified for. Expand everything and look for things with a test you can take. I've actually found a few good ones doing this.

 

Thanks for the response.

Yeah, I've got turkmaster set up with watching a few requesters already because I've noticed their jobs go quick (must be a reason right? lol) Though I'm not qual'd for a lot because of my noobness - so just doing the numbers grind during probation as best I can. I have gotten into a few batches that were paying .40 (short approval and pay time too) a pop that were nice for these first few days though.

Then yeah, once I max out my hits each day (which returns had me confused at first - so I'm super careful about that now) I've been just requesting quals and taking tests if I see them.

 

The probation will go fast. Just be very careful about rejections at this stage. Since you don't have a buffer of approved hits it won't take many rejections to really hurt your approval rating.

Once you get past the probation probably the number one thing you can do is start using PandaCrazy/Hitforker or Hitfinder/Hitcatcher. The former takes a little more getting used to, but is generally better. The latter is a bit easier to use and comes in one package MTS, but doesn't have as many features. In fact once you hit your cap for the day it might be worth your while to start playing with one of those setups so you can be confident in their use since you can't do hits anyway.

Oh and welcome I didn't say it in the last post. The daily is a great place to ask quick questions and hang out if you're bored.

 

Yeah, it's mostly just boring right now. I do like 80% simple ones (a9s etc - looks like 48 hour turn around for approvals with them) to get the numbers up sitting at 219 approved 113 pending and still only the 4 rejections from day 1. The easy ones you can have the full days allotment done in like 15 mins so..yeah I just try and find stuff to read on reddit.

I do have another question about quals. So, a requester added me to a qual and from what I can tell - it was to block me from the current batch. Why wouldn't they just block my account instead of creating a qual? I've been trying to do 20 (8 bucks) of those each day, but today I can't . Never rejected the previous ones or sent me any kind of message)...so I dunno. I suppose I could be jumping the gun as it were. Since normally I do their batches late at night. Today was the first morning I was on there....so yuppers.

Anyway, pouting over ~fin. lol

Does the hitfinder/hitcatcher work better than the turkmaster auto accept? I find it lacking. I mean I understand that their's probably 100 people trying to catch the same thing, but a lot of times it just pops up with the little message and still has the accept button highlighted...instead of auto accepting.

I think the only thing that bothers me about any of it. Is for example - doing a google search for some mturking AAR (After Action Report) goodness...and almost all of the original posters showing off their mad turk'ning skillz*.... now have deleted accounts ..lol (on reddit).

Just got a vlab qual accepted - to bad they're red... Only qual I've gotten that sent me an e-mail about it though. Just rambling now. Hope everyone had a good weekend. Got the damn 1/8 cloud following me around still (old inside joke).

 

You want them to give you a disqual rather than blocking you. The general understanding is with enough account blocks your account can be revoked/suspended. Somebody else might be better qualified to chime in on that.

I can't speak to Turkmaster, I've never used it so . I've used the two combinations I suggested and prefer Panda Crazy/Hitforker. I don't really ever hear people talking about Turkmaster so I just assume there's a reason people don't use it/talk about it, but I could be wrong. This is another one that somebody else might be more qualified to answer than me.

 

Turkmaster is super outdated, so most people use the same setup as Ornac mentioned - Overwatch, PandaCrazy, HitForker

HF is a scraper so you'll set up whatever parameters you want, and it'll run and let you know when something new comes up (It's an edit of the popular HitFinder, edited to coordinate with PandaCrazy):
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/36368-hit-forker

PandaCrazy (PC) has a ton of features and documentation, but to get started, it'll replace your Turkmaster. You'll panda hits there:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/19168-jr-mturk-panda-crazy

And Overwatch (OW) is where you'll watch requesters you want to follow. Say you liked doing whatever batch, and want to be alerted to that requester next time they post, you'll have them in OW and it'll tell you when they post:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/24464-overwatch-for-worker-mturk

MTS is another good one to have in your arsenal. You can read all about it on the link. It's basically an mturk toolbox with a HF and PC alternative and many other features, like your daily earnings, weekly, monthly, it saves everything you do every day, etc.


There are more features in each, and ways to customize whatever set up you want from there - Some people prefer HF as a requester watcher instead of OW, some people prefer PC instead of OW, some people prefer MTS over everything, some people write their own. Your best bet is to start at the bare bones and customize your own workflow from there. It's a lot of trial and error, but worth it.

Oh, and things are auto hyperlinked to lead to the Wiki here. You'll see it happen for anything like common scripts or requesters.

I tried to keep this concise because I know there's a lot to take in at first, but if you have any more questions, feel free to ask! When I started, I downloaded literally every script and panicked not knowing what each one did, so I deleted them all and installed them again one by one so I could understand each one at a time. It's definitely worth investing the time in figuring out at least these few tools to make it a little less frustrating.

 

Hey there- welcome to the Hub

 

Alrighty, let's catch up here.

Yup I've switched over now based on the proceeding posts. Think I need a third monitor now..lol.

Going to group my responses to you with the next one as they're similar.

Alrighty, got it all setup and good to go. Just gotta finish moving my requesters over from TM.

So yeah, I think I'll just need time to play around with them. I had already finished out my day before coming over here to read the post. So, I'll finish messing with them tomorrow. They already seem more responsive than what I was using previously. So I think it'll all turn out well.

Just want to say a big thanks to you folks for helping out and giving suggestions (Hopefully I'll return the favor someday ). At the end of 5 days I'm at 281 approved 164 pending and 4 rejects w/ 20.79 total earnings. I don't know how that really compares to what it'll be like when the chains are off, but I don't feel like I've been wasting my time.

Anyway, thanks again and I hope you have a good day.

Hey hey. Thanks glad to be here.

 

I wish I had the desk space

I'll say again, be real careful about the rejects at this point. You'll want to be keeping your approval rate over 99%. There's a number of people who didn't know/realize how important that is and have spent a lot of time doing hits that aren't terribly profitable to get their rating back up there. Keep an eye out an TV/TO for requesters that tend to reject.

 

So far, still mostly good. lol. Had a few hiccups I guess but nothing that harms my account. Anyway at 521 approvals 70 pending 5 (right under a %) rejects. About 50 more tasks I can do today (7th day). I've basically, since the hiccups - lol. Started trying to take my time a bit with some of the transcription stuff. Never was my strong suit, but from the ones I've done. It's not as uhh what's the nice way to say this? Professional as I expected/worried about. So they really are in their own way..entry level. I do have to say it's odd how the reviewers decipher some of the words that never even came through on audio lol. I had a pretty good one...where it was completely blank - you could see the people talking but no audio. The reviewer wrote that they were talking about changing panties (yeah right, pretty sure that would have perked my attention don't you think?) and gave me a score of 1.5. Other than that though, all my scores for that have been fine (that was my very first one). Another one changed alright to *all right* and took off points too **(I'm a dumbass and was wrong about that). lol. They weren't discussing directions. One person said thank you..the next said Alright. lol end of audio.

They could make it a little easier to know about their dashboard though. I had to find a link from somewhere else and change out my worker ID. to access it. A bit of their stuff is broken too - blank tasks.

So, I need 5k approvals in order to leave reviews for requesters through turkerview - correct?

 

Yep, it's a data quality thing. Feel free to come on over to the daily thread. Everyone's (mostly) nice and you'll get more responses than just me that way

 

To much going on over there. I don't want to pay attention to it. I'd feel bad not responding to people etc. I only plan on updating this until probation is over and then maybe once after 30 days of full access. Sorta like something for future new people to come in and see. I'll write out some stuff where I tried to cut corners and got burned/ some opinionated do's/don't s, actual time keeping for hourly average on job types yada yada. I started up like a journal back on day 1. Just haven't been updating it very well. Then some of you vets can come in and review it and leave better suggestions. Ahh provided I'm not super lazy by that time.

**oh and 30.88 earned with 7 something pending MTS has a different value than what I added up by hand with the last 69 so I dunno exactly how it's delayed.

 

No worries, though if you're looking for hits to do, quals, that sort of thing... there is a work mode you can use in the toolbox on the left hand side of the screen. Also if you are on the current page then it autoupdates so you can scroll and not have to load new pages all the time.

 

Oh, very neat. I'll have to mess with that tomorrow. Thank you.

 

Alrighty, end of day 10.

636 Approved
176 Pending
5 Rejects (3 totally on me, 2 I dunno)
$38.48 Earned

Kinda, worrisome having like 20% still pending, but they're mostly from requesters who've approved and paid before. So, probably nothing to worry about, but I'm not going to add to it. Also, nothing really newbwise to talk about. So on to the one thing I really like.

The transcribing tasks/jobs/hits are probably my favorite thing to do so far. I'll do one of those, then hit up whatever panda has managed to collect. Then rinse and repeat till bored. I must be doing ok (okay..) with the transcribing, as most of my hits for those are being auto-approved. I've sent them an e-mail regarding that, because it doesn't help my quality score if I'm not getting scored.

I think with that though, it's not worth doing those on Mturk and would be better doing on their own platform. So, that you can get into that daily running bonus. Then after awhile maybe investing the money from that into software/pedal and moving onto a company that would pay real wages. Though, I guess if you break your back you could get real wages doing this with their bonuses ( provided you could keep the 3.85 QC). I mean I've definitely already had a couple that I could complete by the time the submit button was ready to go. That's rare though. If they're pretty good audio files I can do most of them around 1m30sec. Which may or may not improve. Some times you've gotta look stuff up. The person might be saying "Rhineal/rineal/ryenal", but you know they're talking about medical stuff and probably mean "Renal". I'm not a doctor though, so look it up just in case. This is a poor example, but you get the idea. The example in the rant below is probably better.

/Rant
Which brings me to my problem with the system. Their reviewers - nobody is perfect, myself included. The problem is like for example - I had one before I decided to finish the day off. Two gents talking about setting up a RAID 0 for backing up stuff. Well, the reviewer changed "raid" to "route" and gave me like a 2.9 rating. I also got dinged for typing "ok" instead of "okay" which is debatable again. Because we're talking about I.T. terminology and these guys could have been clicking the "ok" button. There was no video (so fine type okay). ANYWAY - lol. I can see people getting screwed by this system. This isn't going to hurt me (Yet!), because I have a string of 4's and then auto approvals over those, but if after every string of auto-approvals you get something like the above and then auto-approvals again. Your score is just going down. *salty tears*

What's this guy talking about?
I'm just saying, don't grade people -IF- you yourself don't know what the **** is going on...lol. Save me time having to fill out a dispute.
/Endrant

Blah blah blah

Anyway, really glad I finally started turking. It's probably not the best option in the world, but it's certainly made me consider other avenues to look into. Plus, at the end of the day. Whatever ends up being in the account after the last 176 approve, was all worth it to me. So, thanks again to everyone who contributed to this thread (and made it through this post). I don't know how frequently I'll be around from here on out, but I appreciate all the knowledge that's been shared here.

 

Approved 3,250 (about 1400 from one requester)
Approval Rate 99.82%
Pending 197
Rejected 6
Rejection Rate 0.18%

I've stopped messing with it for now, because I had a hit I was paid a bonus for (e-mail confirmation), but it never showed up in the "HITS completed" section (so, no base pay,approval, and whatever else for records). So, I'm currently dealing with the process where Mturk tells me it's the requesters fault, and the requester ignores my e-mail (probably, they've ignored previous issues). Not to mention mturk leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to keeping track.

Obviously, one isn't really an issue, but how many times has it already happened? How often is it likely to happen again? Like those 1400 through the single requester. That was like 2- 1 and half hour sessions (roughly 700 each night rotating through 2 batches with panda help). How to prevent it in the future? Is it the scripts causing the issues? I dunno only time will tell I guess, but Google searches seem to blame MTS for the issue.

 

Wow you got your numbers up fast. I'm not entirely sure I follow what you're saying here. Are you saying you can't find the hit on Amazon's or MTS's interface? or is it just the bonus you can't find? If it's the latter tracking bonuses is not implemented well(at all) on mturk. There's a bonus tracking system on TV, it's the best thing I've found to use.