Guide: How to address common issues with HITs

When publishing work to the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) marketplace, Requesters sometimes overlook easy-to-miss HIT elements such as properly formatted links or the inclusion of completion codes at the end of Surveys. In other cases, Requesters might accidentally violate our Participation Agreement by asking Workers to do work that jeopardizes their privacy/security or the health of the marketplace as a whole.

When we notice HITs like this, we remove them from the marketplace. We take this action to ensure the safety and health of the MTurk marketplace. The goal of this guide is to educate Requesters on some of the most common pitfalls when designing and publishing HITs in an effort to reduce the frequency that HITs are removed. Here are ways to identify and fix the common symptoms:

Elements of the HIT are broken
HITs are most commonly removed from the MTurk marketplace because some part of the HIT isn’t displaying or functioning properly. Here are the most common reasons of Broken HITs:

· Broken Links: The most common reason for a broken HIT is that the link returns a blank or non-functional page. In most cases, this is because the link in your HIT to the wrong page, for example
https://www.mturk.com/thisisabrokenlink

· Missing Completion Code: When Requesters publish a HIT that links to external survey tools such as Qualtrics or Survey Monkey, they typically use our survey link template. This template contains a field for a ‘survey completion code’ which is used by Workers to input the code they receive at the completion of their survey. This allows Requesters to validate Workers have completed the Survey and approve their work.

· Images Not Loading: Another common reason for a broken HIT is the images embedded in the HIT don’t display to Workers. This is typically due to incorrectly setting the image path during HIT creation or your image server going offline.

· Missing submit HIT buttons: HTML for a submission button must always be included in the HTML of a HIT. Without the submit button, Workers are unable to submit their assignment which prevents Requesters from collecting their data.

It is best practice for Requesters to try completing the HITs as a Workers to confirm your HIT is functioning properly before publishing them to the marketplace. Check out the MTurk Sandbox site (https://requestersandbox.mturk.com/) to test your HIT design before you publish.

Collects personal identifiable information
The internet can be a dangerous place. HITs shouldn’t require Workers to disclose any information that would allow a third party to identify them personally or otherwise put them at risk from an information security standpoint. Some common examples of information considered personally identifiable are first and last names, emails, addresses, and phone numbers. If your HITs contain requests for personally identifiable information, please remove them before re-publishing.

Requires registration at another website or group
Workers shouldn’t have to register at a third party site to perform your work. Requiring that Workers provide personally identifiable information through registration forms is the same as asking for it yourself. This puts Workers in the unenviable position of having to trade information about themselves for work, and we don’t allow it. If your HITs require registration at another website or group, please remove that requirement before re-publishing them.

Generates referred site visits or click-through traffic
MTurk is a marketplace for completing tasks by exercising human intelligence, not for manipulating search engine results. Do not publish HITs for the purpose of generating referred site visits or click-through traffic.

This guide covers the most common HITs issues, but is not exhaustive. If you’ve reviewed the common issues listed above and don’t think any apply to your HITs, be sure to check out our full Policies page for other potential HIT issues here: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies

If you think your HITs were expired in error, please contact MTurk Customer Support at https://requester.mturk.com/contactus