Hey everyone, I don't know if this is MTurk's idea of an April Fools joke, but I'm not laughing.

Several HITS from over the weekend that I "Review and Returned" are showing up as "Abandoned". As of now it's down to five due to a Noah HIT being changed from "Abandoned" to "Paid" overnight. (I seriously have .12 in my MTurk Account this morning)



I've never abandoned a HIT in my years of turking and maintain a 100% Approval Rate, never been softbanned (even from Noah) yet it seems like the last 48 hours is going to destroy all that.

Is this a MTS issue? MTurk? Aliens?

Please help - I've been emailing requesters doing damage control from this all morning.

 

Abandoned just means that the timer ran out on the hit before it was either returned or submitted. The only negative side effect from having a high abandon rate is when requesters use a qual (Abandon Rate is not greater than 20%, for example), which I've only seen a handful of times ever.
MTS changing values could just be a syncing issue on its end

 

Return and reviews don't trigger MTS's 'return' thing so it only will know that it is abandoned.

 

Thanks, that makes me feel a bit better about the negative impact. That said, I'd still like to have that impact negated or at the very least lessened.

Most of all, I'd like to solve the issue so I can continue to use MTS, as it's all kinds of awesome. I'm not doing any more HITS until I decide to ditch MTS altogether or a workable solve is found.

 

This makes perfect sense. So it is an MTS issue. Thank you so much! I'll turn off MTS and see what type of damage control I can do - this seems like the kind of thing that would be IN BOLD PRINT as it can ruin someone's account without them even knowing.

 

Abandoning hits is part of turking, intentional or otherwise, like if you're trying to do a batch and the servers are lagging to hell and all of a sudden 6 of your hits expire as you're trying to submit them lol.
There are quals requesters can use to exclude people that have high return rates too, so they both (returning and abandoning) have the same impact just so you're aware.

 

Damage control? It doesn't matter.

>ruin someone's account

lmao no it doesn't matter stop freaking out.

 

"Review and Return" is just returning the HITs, nothing more nothing less. So, you do not need to worry about using it. @ChrisTurk

This is what is happening (in my opinion): You are accepting a HIT. MTS knows that you accepted the HIT. You review and returned the HIT. MTS do not know you returned the HIT since you did not return it properly but used R&R. MTS is looking for the HIT. You neither submitted the HIT nor returned the HIT. then MTS says you abandoned the HIT since there is no HIT in your queue. @Kadauchi

 

It is not even an issue. You are not abandoning anything, you are just returning.

 

She's correct. MTS has no clue where it went, so it just assumed it expired.

Abandoned == sat in your queue until the timer ran to 0
Returned == returned

They make little to no difference to your actual MTurk account, and in this case MTS is just wrong, but harmlessly so. Review/Returns will be processed by MTurk as actual returns (MTurk does not see your actual review, just the returned action), not abandons.

The exact same thing would happen if you returned the HIT from a different browser profile or phone or any of a ton of scenarios that would likely pop up to make this unreliable. I'll look into it & see if I can get it to recognize return reviews properly though.

 

Thanks Chris, I see that you're 100% correct in that it doesn't "abandon" the HITs within MTurk itself, only in MTS. Once again Turkleton, you've saved the day!

Now as for people saying "abandonments doesn't matter", that is demonsterably false, as there are a minority of requesters that use it to qualify and it's certainly taken into account for people hoping to get Masters qualification. Still, I appreciate the help. (Probably not a great idea to tell someone to "calm down". It's meaningless over the internet and only makes people more upset in person) Concerned does not equal upset, just a protip.

 

I... I did not know this. I'm currently sitting at an 18% return rate, which I assume isn't good. Thank you - seriously.

 

I wouldn't sweat about it. I can count on one hand the amount of return or abandonment related exclude quals I've seen in 5 years so far lol
I've seen many more hits with exclude quals of something like "Less than 50000 approved" which kind of sucks

 

So a hilarious end to all this would be the email response from a well known requester a few minutes ago asking me what in the actual hell I was talking about!

You guys and gals are the best.

 

I was actually gonna mention this but figured they'd get the point across.

IIRC, the quals were removed from the requester UI for use at all, so only an incredibly small % of requesters will even know it exists at all :emoji_sweat_smile: