I tried to automatically accept the redwood hits so I can continue to work on them and it keeps telling me after I submit one that there are no more hits although it says there are over 50. Whats the deal with this?
Redwood hits always have that problem. Not sure why, but you can almost NEVER trust the available hits numbers for them. There is a Caption Requirement Review hit that is always at least at 1400 hits, and I've kind of learned that you can get 20 from that batch or so (if you are lucky) before they come up as "no more available" but the counter will never go lower than 1400 hits All of redwood hits are like that.
Very true, and...they're not particularly motivated to fix it, because showing a lot of HITs lures more Turkers to work on the batch. I believe it has something to do with how they set up the HIT. They can't actually lie with the total numbers in terms of what MTurk overall sees, so they would, for example, actually have started with 1400 HITs. But...they are free to put their own restrictions in place as far as how many each Turker can take, and that allows them both to show a high number on the HIT structure but also to cut you off way before then.