Can't Find Regal HITs? 10/14 All Hail Forum Princess Flora! Friday

Qualification HIT for future HITs

Title: Qualification -- Age & Gender | PANDA Requester: Unanimous A.I. [A1OVB3ATBAQ1KM] (TO) TO Ratings: ☢☢☢☢☢ 4.20 Communicativity ☢☢☢☢☢ 3.04 Generosity ☢☢☢☢☢ 4.47 Fairness ☢☢☢☢☢ 4.65 Promptness Number of Reviews: 33 (Submit a new TO rating for this requester) Description: Qualification regarding your Age and Gender Time: 5 minutes Hits Available: 1 Reward: $0.05 Qualifications: Millennials has not been granted; Location is US

 

Title: Determine if the titles from two sources are similar. | PANDA Requester: PDS_PN1 [A2M3D22LKS2QE4] (TO) TO Ratings: ☢☢☢☢☢ 2.71 Communicativity ☢☢☢☢☢ 2.90 Generosity ☢☢☢☢☢ 3.50 Fairness ☢☢☢☢☢ 3.90 Promptness Number of Reviews: 22 (Submit a new TO rating for this requester) Description: Determine if the titles from two sources is the same. Time: 60 minutes Hits Available: 530 Reward: $0.02 Qualifications: None

 

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/previewandaccept?groupId=3PBTVBPQ9UI5R0A3PW7WXNE8W4CLGC

 

Hey everyone! I'm sorry this was so late in coming, the holiday and work has thrown me for a loop this week. As promised, the trick or treat hit will be coming tomorrow, before 1PM EDT. I know people are asking for them to be posted later, next week I'll do one after 6pm EDT I promise.

The same info about the hits, quals, etc. as I've been posting over and over is contained in the spoiler below, as well as the password for the qual and the link to the qual test.

There is a panda contained in the spoiler below, but I highly recommend also searching for my requester ID Tjololo, my ID is A20IXK8ZV8N72H. This is because I'm not sure how pandas and groupids are generated, so I'm not sure whether it'll change or not. I don't think it will, but just in case.

Spoiler

As you may have heard (or may not if you live under a rock), I will be doing my Trick or Treat hits again this year. Why? Because last year was awesome and I want to do it again, don't judge me.

For those who have never participated, I've spoilered a description below, with screenshots, because everyone got confused and I want to nip it in the bud now.

Spoiler

There are three pages/parts to the trick or treat hit. The first part is this page. Keep in mind, the backgrounds and text may change slightly, I like to change it up. This page basically says to accept the hit, obviously.

When you accept the hit, you get to page two, which you can see an example of here. Because of the way this hit works, in order to return, it needs to be on your continue page. So the instructions here are to go to the hits assigned to you link and continue the hit from there.

When you continue, you will see the last page, example here. This page has a button with Mr Skeltal on it. Click Mr Skeltal and get a trick or a treat. Easy enough right?

"But TJ" you might say, trying desparately to figure out the complexities, "how will I know if I got a trick or a treat?" If you got a treat, you get the hit amount (which I'm setting at $0.10 right now), the hit submits, and everything looks normal. If you get a trick, the hit will return itself. See the Technical Details part to see what that looks like, but basically if you don't see a normal submit, it returned. You can verify that on your status page.

For those who DO know, hopefully you've accepted my qual by now. If not, please do so by going HERE to take the qual test. HOWEVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Since I'm doing a bulk thing, PLEASE DO NOT USE YOUR USERNAME! I'm going to be making a script that will check for the password:

36b669382b02cb0473f0517bcf60d9f8

Use this in the qual test, and only this, no other characters. People keep putting return characters in, that breaks my scripts and I have to go in and fix it manually. Please just put that string in, in its entirety, and nothing else.

I've had people express their concern that I'm only active during work hours, and some people can't participate then, so I'll do my best to accomodate. But I can't be doing one-offs at 2am, I sleep, sorry. Because of this, I'm going to run the first batch tomorrow after work hours. Not sure when, but I'll be in class starting at 6:30 EST, so it'll be sometime after that most likely. I'll be posting in all the forums and IRC, so make sure you have your requester ID searches running! this *should* be the panda, but I can't guarantee it.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:

Because this is a controversial hit (it might not seem like it but people get bitter), I've decided to do a few things differently this year. Namely, I'm going to try to schedule at least a little bit more, give y'all some heads up, and to prevent people from winning every time.

This hit is a luck-based hit. I create a random number that is one of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. If the number is 1,2,3,4,5, the hit will *return* (READ: NOT REJECT) itself, someone else can accept that hit. If the number is 6,7,8,9,10, the hit will submit, and WILL approve in 1 minute.

PLEASE LOOK HERE TO SEE WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN YOUR HIT IS RETURNED! I got 800 people asking me about that every day. You will see an "Invalid URL Parameters" error. This means your hit was returned, and you DID NOT WIN. If your hit submitted, you see the normal "Your hit has been submitted to Tjololo for approval" thing.

IF YOUR HIT WAS SUBMITTED: Enjoy your dime. After all the hits have submitted, but before the next hit is live, I will be granting you a qual that will exclude you from accepting a hit in the next batch. After that batch is done, your qual will be removed, and you will be eligible for the NEXT batch. In other words, you can only win once per week.

THE FINAL BATCH: I haven't figured that one out, but it's going to be larger. I've had people offer to pay to make it even BIGGER, and I'll see if that's the direction I want to go. As of right now, I have enough personal funds to make the last batch almost the same size as the whole previous month, so it'll be larger and pay better, though how much of each I'm not sure. I'll have to fiddle with the numbers and mturk's fees. I will only be doing ONE final batch, so if you don't win, sorry. It will definitely happen on 10/31. Not sure of the time though. Maybe I'll do a few smaller batches throughout the day, I don't know. I'll figure it out.

CHEATING:

Cheating isn't cool. I've taken lengths to prevent it, but people still try. Last year I had 3 cheaters. If you cheat, I *will* know about it, you'll get my cheater qual. This qual will be set as "not assigned" for every hit I plan to do, and you will be ineligible forever, so don't cheat. What do I mean by cheating? Trying to force submit, or circumvent the random number, or doing any fancy nonsense to give yourself an edge. If you're that desparate for a dime, I'll give you free access to my couch, take whatever change you want, don't ruin it for everyone else. Seriously, it's not cool. If I had thought about it last year I would have hard blocked the cheaters, but this year instead I'm just going to prevent you from ever working on my hits again.

Also, I'm trying to raise awareness for the sale of MTG. There's more info in the spoiler below, but I just wanted to bring it to everyone's attention. Why? More info below.

Spoiler

Without getting too far into it, it was brought to my attention that the forum was being sold sort of "under the radar", with no comments about it and/or community involvement, link here. I don't think it should need to have it per se, NathanPS is free to do with his site what he wishes. However, when I visited the link, I see information that is made to appear good to potential buyers, but is not indicative of the forum activity. I see page views all over the place, but no mention that the page views are from users constantly refreshing the one thread over and over, and are not from unique users visiting the site (important for ad revenue). In addition, he mentiones "our traffic majority comes from google" which I find hard to believe.

The straw that broke the camel's back, however, is this comment: screenshot and this comment: screenshot. Potential buyers are being decieved into thinking that the page views are from legitimate, new users who are potential ad sources. It's a clever comment too, implying that recently sales of the donor perks have increased, even though you can see the revenue has been dropping (except for June, which I've been told is when he ran a donation campain for another user...did he count the donations as revenue for the purposes of bumping up how the site looks to potential buyers?)

So I left a (albeit poorly worded) comment, seen here, warning potential buyers about it. He deleted the comment, so I left another inviting people to PM me on MTG since it's obvious I couldn't put any information on flippa. He deleted that too. Then I and a few others started calling out specifics of his posting, and talking with @FiL on the site who agreed with our analysis. I asked Nathan to give an accounting of users who had been granted the donor perks per month over the past 9 months (which is do-able, and would support his case tremendously). I woke up this morning, and all posts were deleted, with a flippant remark about "rival forums trying to disregard the sale".

I'm not trying to start a witch hunt, nor am I trying to prevent the sale of MTG. I support it being sold...to a turker. I do not support it being sold to someone who's going to scalp it, throw ads on it, and forget it exists becuase you apparently only need to spend 5 hours a week on the forum. I also object to my concerns and comments being deleted to put up a facade in order to attract people who don't have anyone else's needs in mind but their own. Regardless of my personal feelings about the forum(s), they're all a part of the same community, and having one of them owned by a rando who is only looking at the forum as a revenue stream, in my mind, is unacceptable. I'd rather see MTG go to someone who would kill it than someone who would fill it with ads and increase donor price in the hope to make a few bucks. That's all, I'll get off my soapbox now and let you continue on with your day.