This thread is for Lindsay Kennedy, who currently has about 30K "find an email" HITs up. https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=2SFXP3TVOK5UNX5RHWHEWZF0RY925S Hopefully she will stop by!
At first I found a few of them, but not on the provided url. Hope that works. I marked a couple of them N/A. I am not optimistic about that. I've done ten of them, and they seem to be getting tougher. I just hope I didn't get burned.
they are on 7 day auto approval.. plus in e-mails they have said it is ok to put n/a because they understand not all of them will have e-mails.
pretty easy, takes me @ 30 seconds unless I have to go into the actual website which is about 1 out of 4 hits, then its @ a minute to 1:20.
I mailed the requester about this and they confirmed it's fine to get the address from another site. They also know that not all of them will be able to be found.
I did 73 of the last batch of these when they were up on October 12. All approved, no problems. Only thing I didn't do was use the "n/a" escape hatch: if I couldn't find the person's E-mail address, I returned the HIT. I just finished doing another 149. I tried to make it to 150, but they were being snapped up at a rate of over 75/minute towards the end of my session. I hope someone wasn't scamming and just marking them all "n/a".
Next thing you know, we'll have one of these foreigners talking about, "my account's suspended, help."
If someone from some exotic land gets his account suspended for scamming, I have zero sympathy for him. I'd also think that his countrymen would be dancing joyfully in the streets to celebrate his ban, considering that it's the scammers that have made it so that it's nigh-impossible for an honest person to obtain a new account. My concern is more that the person who posted these HITs would be disgusted with her poor quality results and abandon the MTurk platform, as so many other requesters have done. I hope she has a robust QC system in place to check and verify the results.
I have used the n/a many times on these hits and never had a problem. It doesn't make sense to me for people to skip the hit just because they can't find the e-mail address when it clearly states in the directions it is ok to put n/a.. I completed over 1,000 of these total with no problems..
My decision to not put n/a down was for personal reasons. If I had put n/a down and someone whose Google-Fu was stronger than my own came along and did manage to find an E-mail address for that person, then that would mean that I was wrong, and I really, really don't like being wrong. As it stands, I am confident that every single E-mail address I submitted was correct, and, like most men, I love being right.
Khalinov---noticed that too, and I also prefer your edited version! Having less unwarranted stereotyping is always good. Fools are everywhere, after all. Right. We want to keep requesters like these; haven't done the HITs myself (what with my low-volume preferences), but I looked yesterday and was pleased again to see that it looked to be a good-quality HIT from a new requester. MTurk is generally known in the crowdsourcer world (requesters) to offer about 70% accuracy to requesters as a whole. That ain't all that impressive, so I believe Amazon realizes that if they can bring that up so that requesters don't have to create big QC systems just to get usable results, it would serve them well. And we women so often don't let you, hm.
My only concern would be that if there were a lot of N/A's then there might be something suspicious going on. Either I was doing something wrong, or that the requester might be doing something they shouldn't be doing. Especially after several url's coming up with a virus attack. Aa it happens, there wasn't much for anyone with a decent virus control system on their computer to be worried about in that batch, but you never can tell. Without Norton, my computer might well be zapped by now.
I have been doing mine this way to cut down on the search time: copy/paste the name and website into google, or the name and school into google.. if there is an e-mail it will pop up this way 90% of the time if not, go to the actual site and search the directory (if there is one).. sometimes the e-mail will be via outlook, but if you hoover on the name or part where it says e-mail it will show in the bottom corner after 90 seconds of searching the web i put n/a hope these tips help.. others feel free to share yours
