Launching ExperimentsΒΆ

This section of the guide is rough, and we could use your help to clean it up.

  • When you finally launch your meteor experiment rejoice for you have earned a long-rest and a vacation on the beach
  • Actually don’t because things aren’t as “automatic” as they may seem
  • You still need to manage your active experiment to deal with users in real time
  • As of this writing (9/24/15) it seems far more advantageous to launch many “small” HITs instead of several large ones
  • Why? Turkers will not sit around your lobby waiting to getting matched for very long
  • You will likely get angry emails and because they have to return your HIT in order to leave (or simply disconnect) it will be non-trivial/impossible to compensate them for their time (see Matching issues above for some strategies to avoid this)
  • Though speculative, this is probably because as other Requesters launch their HITs, your’s will fall to the bottom of the list getting lost and missed by Turkers
  • To combat this, use the HITs menu on Turkserver to launch new HITs (with the same parameters you set using the MTurk menu) one after another
    • 10-20 seem’s fairly reliable and finishes up within 15 minutes
    • 40+ really depends on the time of day and can take anywhere from 30 minutes to never finishing
  • [NEEDS TESTING] It might be possible to simply add more assignments to an expired HIT and relaunch it, but it’s unclear whether this “pushes” your HIT to the top of the page for Turkers to see [UPDATE 9/25/15] it looks like this works!