I ended up stepping away from mTurk for a while, but I'm back at it and I've read some about panda crazy and overwatch, but I'm kind of confused about them. I set up panda crazy but there were some confusing things on the interface, which I know I can figure out if I give it another shot, but it didn't seem like there was much it does that Turkmaster doesn't. Is there some reason that panda crazy and/or overwatch are better than Turkmaster? I don't quite get what overwatch does.. it just finds the items instead of letting you panda them? I don't know.. I also have a bunch of old hits in my turkmaster, so is there a place that I can look up IDs of common hits people save? I don't even know which googles are still around, but I have mountains, burke, zoltar, etc but then also my likes, venue quality, things like that. Thanks!
Turkmaster is kinda a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none, and it's pretty old. It works, but people have come up with a variety of newer scripts that specialize in doing things more efficiently. Overwatch alerts you when a known good requester posts. It searches the first page of hits for anything on your list so you get an alert when a request posts new hits. It doesn't run pandas but compared to using TM to watch a requester will use far fewer page requests since it searches for everything on its list in a single request. Panda Crazy just does pandas. I think it hands page requests better than TM. Rather than separate timers for each panda (which can proc at the same time and cause a pre) it has a universal timer and runs one panda each cycle of the timer. That allows you to set the timer as close to the limit as you can and get the most searches for pandas as possible. It's usually better to keep the number of pandas running to a minimum however, to avoid spreading out the searches for any individual panda too much. PC also has options for limiting the number of a particular hit that it will accept and some other features that you may want to play with.
Thanks so much! That explains them all very well and I will give the new ones a try now. TM certainly does use too many page requests.
