Searching their HITs today, I can find only "Approve a transcript," "Improve a transcript," and "Fix incorrect words" HITs (None of which I am qualified for). Further, their site at http://turkers.castingwords.com/ appears to be down. Anybody know anything about this?
Gonna ruin my six day work streak. Usually I can't keep it going to that long because it can be pretty boring.
Anyone having problems again? turkers.castingwords.com is inaccessible for me, and I'm guessing the workshop populates parts of your profile from there because I now can't accept any jobs on the workshop. "You are limited to jobs at a time," it says. No, there's no number in that sentence.
It's down, yeah. I haven't started working through the Workshop yet and probably never will because of the payment differences between Paypal and Amazon Payments. But I have noticed a trick for using the Workshop interface to find work that you want to do through mTurk. If you find a job you like in the Workshop, click the "RELATED JOBS" button at the top left of the screen. If there are more parts available, you'll see the mTurk name for the jobs, like "Express Transcription: Denver Peter William #147086 (avg rwrd+bns: $0.28) [00:56 mmss]" Go back to mTurk, and search for "Denver Peter William" to find all available work from that customer, or "#147086" to find all the work in that particular series from that customer. Sometimes (most of the time?) you can also get the series number by hovering your mouse over the link to download/save the audio. If you get a link with a filename like this: AF147086watch_000.00_EOF.mp3 Then 147086 is the series number. I prefer the turkers interface much more. The new one is sweet, don't get me wrong. But I want to see the categories. I want to only browse the Express list first. I don't want to everything jammed together like that. And I sure as heck don't want to wait until Friday to start a financial transfer to Paypal when takes 4-7 days to move funds. CW paying out on Friday means anywhere from Tuesday to Wednesday to get funds into your bank account. I am beyond in love with Amazon Payments speed. You can't beat one business day unless you're talking about non-banking digital transfers like intra-Paypal.
On a related note, not everything you can find through the Workshop appears on mTurk. I don't know how that works, but I'm seeing it this morning. There's a series called "Mike Smith ..." (awesome quality but having to look up the names of places in Australia and colleagues of the guy they are honoring really slow you down) and I can clearly see pieces of that job in the Workshop that aren't on mTurk. There's one for $1.01 base pay, $0.97, $0.64, $0.60, $0.58, some for $0.41, on and on. If you search mTurk for that customer, "Boston Roger" and apparently "Easy Boston Roger" (is Easy normal, and does the lack of it mean express?) the jobs start at $0.39. There are at least eight jobs that pay more than that in the Workshop that don't appear in mTurk and haven't since I sat down to work over an hour ago. If I didn't need all this money as fast as humanly possible to pay an emergency bill due on the 11th, I'd go in there and do them.
Sorry for babbling here and going off-topic, but apparently I guessed correctly. If you search (right this second, the work may be gone by the time you search) for "Boston Roger", anything that starts with Easy ("Easy Boston Roger") is regular, and just "Boston Roger" is Express. Nifty. I didn't know that. Update: bleh, I just found an "Easy Blah Blah" express. pfft.
I sympathise with all of that. The presentation of jobs on workshop isn't great, but the pay/minute column is welcome even though it is based on grade 7 work. Your comment about jobs appearing on workshop vs. mturk works both ways too. I noticed that virtually no grading jobs from mturk were appearing on the workshop, though after an email to support that seems to have improved. Yeah, I noticed the thing you mentioned about jobs being named on the workshop so you can search them on mturk. I use the workshop because I'm in the UK, and I'd like to get paid in actual money, not gift credit that I can only use on amazon.com. Why Amazon can't sort out payments to people overseas, or allow gift credit to work on any of their sites (co.uk, co.jp, etc) I don't know. It's even more inexcusable when Amazon has sites in so many countries. I use turkers.castingwords to check for jobs, then take them on the workshop. I wrote a script that appends pay/minute to each listed job based on a 9 grade, sorts them in descending order of pay/minute, and alerts me every time expedited scripts are posted. Not a lot of use right now with the expedited queue full up with crap, but you get the idea. I think "Easy" is just another part of the customer name. I'm sure I remember some expediteds having that in their name. I dunno why CW don't just use the phonetic alphabet! Sounds like you're not doing expediteds yet. I don't know for sure if this helped me, but I eventually thought that CW probably don't factor in lengths of transcriptions when calculating your PPT, so you might reduce the time to attain that magic 99 by just doing all the shortest jobs like a crazy person. I realize the pay probably sucks in the meantime, but it's an investment.
Yeah, it's relative. The sorting order wouldn't change even if it were G8 or G9. I have a Greasemonkey script for the turkers.castingwords.com HIT page that turns the lists into nice tables that can be sorted by G8 pay or an estimate of what it's worth at my speed. Gotchya. I'm glad the Workshop is there for you. I think their deal is that they wanted Amazon Payments to be a competitor to Paypal, and when it didn't just magically happen, they just kind of left it on auto-pilot and haven't really touched it since. It's such a shame. Amazon is probably in the best position of any non-bank in the world to challenge Paypal but they just didn't put any effort into it. Neither did Google. Paypal needs a serious competitor to force them to innovate, otherwise it's just going to sit there and be no different now than it was ten years ago, which is precisely what's happened. My PPT is 94 and hasn't been updated since July 20, 2012 (you can see the exact date on the mTurk qual page.) Right now I'm on auto-approval for 8s. I had a string of 117 straight auto 8s that finally broke yesterday. I think it's been two months since non-autos were anything but 9s. I'll ask them to reevaluate soon. I'm not unhappy with the way things are going and I'd rather keep things moving to get bills paid down before I rock the boat. I'm sure you understand.
Yeah, sure. I was on auto-8s for a long time too, but after a while when I was getting human grades I found I was often getting 9s, but the system was leaving me with 8. I asked support to check them, grades were increased and things started slowly ticking up. I think you only need to be 95 or 96 to get auto 9s, so if you're getting contradictory human/auto grades like I was it could be worth asking for a review. Notwithstanding rocking the boat, of course. I think I was poisoned by my pretty dismal early hits though. My very first hit was an edit job, and I got a 4, and I didn't get a 9 until I'd submitted about 20-30 hits, I think. Took a while for the average to get over that.