HA! turkalert just emailed me lolz 'two lakes' hits... how useless is that. Turkaklert truly is a nice idea but rarely ever notifies fast enough. I'd pay for a service that did like turkalert that actually notified certain requester listing the second they pop up... hmmm.. business opportunity for a good coder? I would pay a small monthly fee for sure cause I wouldn't be getting in right away instead of halfway or not at all like turkalert does for me.
I was just thinking the same thing. I'm considering posting at the turkopticon forum, asking for suggestions from lilly and six about good programmers they know for a fact are talented and nice and ethical and alla that, that we could hire to write more scripts for us. (I trust the turkopticon people.) I want - a faster turkalertish thing - a better block requester script - a script that ran on top of turkopticon that searches by hits currently available + requester by pay and fairness (if that makes sense) etc I would TOTALLY be willing to help pay a programmer.
I would also. They could keep the current system for free and offer a membership that give immediate notifications instead of how they miss some now because some hits don't stay on the first page long enough for the way they have it set up now so they do not alert some hits that go up. There has got to be a way they can catch every hit that comes up and immediate notify by email or something. I am not a programmer but I would image it can be done.
I actually just called my programmer friend asking him if he could do this. He said maybe. (I'm thinking we can just "all" throw a dollar, 50 cents, whatever) here and there at a trusted, experienced programmer till they reach the amount they pre-determine is fair pay for their work. Oncethey have the money, they publish the script. I'm a bit of a hippie, so I'd say once created, it should be free to all turkers. Like turkopticon. Not sure how to work out maintenance fees, but it probably wouldn't be rocket science, especially if it was just a matter of transferring small funds via Amazon payments.
free is always best =] the only problem is the allowable refresh rate the mturk server allows. I think it would work though with a script checking for certain requesters at 1 second intervals. Matter of fact it can't be that complicated. I am sure there is a script out there on the net that does this already and would need some tweaking to work. OFF TO THE GREAT GOOGLE TO SEARCH! hehe
Making a new thread for this idea in scripts section. sorry for hijacking this thread by the way. my apologies.