In over a year of doing HITs on and off for CastingWords, I've never seen any real pattern. My PPT only ever changed when I first started, saw a lack of 80+ jobs, and sent an e-mail basically saying, "How can I get the (what I thought was) mandatory 85 PPT rating if there are no jobs to do?" I would've been content with confirmation that 80+ jobs actually existed, but they just sort of bumped me up to 85. Since then I started out with low scores (7-8 with a few 5s) that seem like they should've dropped me below 85, but my PPT remained unchanged. More recently (say, in the past 8 months or so) I virtually always score 8 or 9, and again my PPT remains unchanged. Is there some extra step to this? Is it witchcraft? Because to me this seems like witchcraft, but it'd be superneat if they started throwing more money at me. To those wondering, I'm not positive if this is a genuine question or a thinly veiled rant topic.
Your last line is particularly awesome. To actually respond to your question, though, your timing is interesting, because as of yesterday, they adjusted their PPT algorithm so that the increases slow down after 85. For all practical purposes, this just makes increases from there a bit harder to get, yet not at all impossible. This should not make things any worse in your case, though, because it sounds to me that with you, your account is just overdue for a manual lookup. They are actually great about this, so I would just contact them as you usually do (support.castingwords.com or through the email address posted at turkers.castingwords.com) and point out that your PPT has been stuck at 85 for a year. Bonus points, I'm sure, if you ask whether there's anything you could be doing differently, though I'll bet they immediately see that you have just fallen through the cracks, unfortunately. So...at least you won't need witchcraft to counter this spell. Unless you count the magic of email! Good luck with it, though I think you won't need much to get them to do something quickly (not unless you rant directly at them, which might give them pause). And thanks again for your fun wording!
Aha! I'd been assuming this was all an automatic process, but maybe that's hard to piece together on Amazon's end of things. Maybe I was removed from the mainstream of check-ups when I originally asked about my PPT? I guess if that's all it is, time to find out if they consider my record good enough for 90+ HITs or whatever. Thanks. On a tangentially related note, haven't had time to read much of it, but I must say this book looks promising.
You know, it's supposed to be an automated process on CW's backend, but I do get the impression that certain accounts just get missed, and it's not clear to me why. You could be right that when they manually changed it the first time, they did it by removing you from the automatic-eval queue! But I'm just speculating there. So right, I wouldn't take it personally that yours has not budged in a while. I think many good Turkers are used to being patient with requesters. That's polite, but I also think that CW is a particularly good requester because they really want you to tell them if something seems off. And then they look into it...in a relative jiffy, even! As to your tangent---hey, it's your thread. I vote you can take it anywhere you want! So I'm super happy to hear that you got the book and are intrigued by it so far. I've been kinda bowled over lately by its terrific feedback at my blog and its excellent reviews on Amazon (including one from CW staff yesterday!). Hearing that it's helping people is really wonderful, so I hope you find it a help, too.