I'm hoping this doesn't win the award for the dumbest question asked by a newbie, but how do you add hits to the Hit Queue? I click on a hit and do the work, I don't get it. Also, how many rejections do people normally get? I've already gotten two. One was this morning and the requestor apologized for making a mistake and paid me a bonus of 2 cents, but that doesn't help my approval rating. The other one was really infuriating. The requester disagreed with me about a word that I classified as a curse word and as a sexual act. Aargh! I'm down to 99.5% approval already and am starting to get nervous about what I work on.
whenever you accept a HIT manually (by clicking Accept) or through a script it goes into your queue. Rejections, well depends on the requester, but you want to check the TurkerView (TV) or Turkopticon (TO) to see reviews. Some people go a long time without getting any. Others just seem to play it YOLO and trip over mass rejections. Depends on your work strategy.
If you accept a HIT - it'll be in your queue. If you accept a HIT, you don't have to work on it right away, you can close it down and work on it later. You can accept 25 HITs at once - and they'll be in your queue. HITs have expiration timers on them though which range from like a minute to several days.
Also come join us in the daily thread - https://turkerhub.com/threads/04-21-soothing-saturday.1352/ and ask as many questions as you want.
Give yourself a couple days to learn the ins and outs of mturk. Once you get the hang of it and understand how it works - you should look into using some userscripts. PandaCrazy OverWatch and mTurkSuite are the most popular. It can be a bit daunting at first, but if you have to start with just 1 - definitely go for Mturksuite and learn to use the "HitFinder" on it. It'll scrape mturk for every new HIT that gets posted, so you can grab them right away. Then you can start adding more scripts/utilities into your arsenal once you get the hang of things.
Also, rejections CAN and WILL kill your approval rating when you're just starting out. When you don't have much padding (lots of HITs done) - a bunch of rejections can make working on mTurk very difficult (requesters tend to require that people have a high approval rating to work on their HITs) I'd be careful about working on shady requesters, especially batch work. Surveys from educational institutions are usually pretty safe. TurkOpticon and turkerview are utilities/websites that people use to post reviews of certain requesters. You can see if a lot of people got rejections from them in the past - and use that to gauge whether you want to take the risk. I think mturksuite will give you turkopticon by default - itll show you a little rating next to the requeter names on the mturk website where you can view ratings.
Thank you both for the pointers! I'm checking out MTurkSuite now. You can probably expect questions about that next...
The MTurk Suite made a huge difference. Thanks again for the help! One more question. If you start taking a survey and realize you've taken it before, should you return the hit, or just take the survey again? Frankly, some of these are so similar I'm not sure if I've seen them before!
For that rejection someone apologized about and admitted their mistake, ask them to reverse your rejection. If they made a mistake then it's the least they could do.
