I'm looking at all their many "Qualification" threads they've been posting for the last month or so. Normally, you would expect such things to be fairly quick and reasonably simple. These pay you $0. On the "Data Collecting" qualifier they have right now you have to log onto THIRTY different websites, collect a TON of data about corporate job listings and plug all that info onto their "qualifier." For nothing. There are literally HUNDREDS of these hits right now. Has Crowdsource resorted to stealing work and data from users--with a false promise of future work? Because logging onto 30 sites is going to take probably well over an hour. This is ridiculous. Does anyone know anything about these kinds of qualifiers they keep posting?
Never knew anything about this, but this sort of thing is EXACTLY why I stopped bothering trying to do anything for them. I was doing the Google search HITs for a short period of time, but after the captcha implementation, I've since noped the fuck outta doing anything from CrowdSource. They used to be a great requester, now they've gone to shit.
They now have hundreds if not thousands of these unpaid "Qualification" hits. Why would they need so many? And by the way--they're all unique. They are getting work done for free. And they're greedy. One of them says you have to submit more than one "Qualification" hit to succeed (all unpaid, as I said). The hit reads " NOTE: You are expected to complete 15 products, each submission has 5 products - if you do not have 3 submissions for this task, you automatically fail." Trust me--I looked very carefully at these hits. If you really want to go through all three of those qualifier hits it'd take at least half an hour. For nothing. I'm just calling them out. I think they're stealing work.
On a related note, they now mass reject you. DO NOT do any crowdsource hits http://i.imgur.com/eTCmPTQ.png
The different levels of qualifications are a response to people who were exploiting a previous qualification loophole. Before, people were able to bypass bans and the rejections meant nothing to them, so they'd hit CS with tons of spam HITs from a virtually unlimited number of fake accounts. Now, instead of banning bad workers, CS is only opening up the data work to proven good workers. It's unfortunate, sure, but it's not an attempt at getting free work. It's an attempt to maintain the quality of the submitted work. Besides, designing, releasing, reviewing, and assigning quals on top of normal HITs, not to mention commenting in the official forum, actually added a ton of work for CS on the backend.
No I am afraid you are wrong. I have received 60 rejections and a block from Crowdsource and when I inquired as to the reason they lied to me saying I submitted hits in under ONE second. This is physically impossible as it takes that long for their interface to even load on the page let alone typing in all the answers to the questions. Even if I were to just spam answers, which I didn't, it would still take over ONE second. Not only that but they rejected hits from six different batches of hits I did. Therefore I would have had to get answers for different keywords every time and thus did not spam. I had been doing Crowdsource hits for months prior and every single one of them approved. In fact, just the very day before all these rejections, all my Crowdsource hits approved. So I was doing them right, changed nothing, and got rejected/blocked anyway. They are looking for free work and are scammers. I will do everything I can to report them in as many ways as possible because these types of requesters should not be littering mturk and sullying its reputation even further than they already have. Edit: I'd also like to mention that at the time of this writing I have 112,602 hits approved with a 99.8% approval rate. Over 100k hits approved but yeah, I'm a spammer. Good one.
I notice now that while in the past they would approve (generally) within 24 hours, some of the hits are lingering on, waiting for approval, for 10 days or more. This in itself isn't cause for alarm. I haven't had any rejections myself but am growing wary of doing their hits.
The qualification hits are just that -- hits to take to get a qualification. You can only do one of them, and you either pass or fail. As for being banned for submitting too fast, that's a common complaint. I do only a few of their hits that I know I can do quickly and pay well, I stopped doing the search hits when the pay went down drastically. I'm also a writer there (who never writes due to the freakishly difficult guidelines), but I am qualified to write and edit titles and I sometimes do categorization hits for them. Other than that, I'm over CS. I've moved on to greener pastures.