10/18 - Woke Wednesday!

https://web.archive.org/web/20170821112757/https://www.mturk.com/mturk/conditionsofuse

 

Shit.

 

I don't understand how they could practically enforce this.. They'd have to cull portions of their most prolific worker base in order to spread the message.. do you just randomly start banning top X% of page request generating accounts and hope people understand why?

I just.. can't imagine a scenario where they enforce this with account suspensions. I think what will happen is that a long existing loophole in scraping will be effectively closed, and normal workers wont notice anything.

 

Yeah, hopefully. I don't like to be all "chicken little" with everything. But it's good to have timely info as soon as it's released.

 

I'm a man of action, not words

Until I see some shit start happening, I just opened another scraper

 

Title: [German language proficiency required] Produkt zum Interesse Relevanz Audit (Sie müssen Deutsch lesen) | PANDA Worker: Preview | Accept | Requester Requester: Amazon Requester Inc. - Customer Interests [A225CX8SZ86ADP] (Contact) TO 1: [Pay: 3.48] [Fast: 4.70] [Comm: 0.00] [Fair: 5.00] [Reviews: 30] [ToS: 0] TO 2: [Rate: $4.50/hr] [Pen: 0.04 days] [Res: -- of 0] [Rec: 100% of 1] [Rej: 0] [ToS: 0] [Brk: 0] Reward: $0.01 Duration: 5 minutes Available: 3419 Description: Bestätigen Sie die Etikettierung von Produkten mit Interesse (z.B. 'Batman', 'segeln' etc). Single Ja / Nein pro HIT, durchschnittliche geschätzte Zeit p> Requirements: Total approved HITs is not less than 1000; HIT approval rate (%) is not less than 98; Location is one of: US;

HIT exported from Mturk Suite v1.25.7​

 

If they choose to enforce the rules as they're written, yes.

But keep in mind that this IS Amazon, and they were already "not enforcing the rules as written due to a clarification" prior to today. So not all is lost.

I'm an Amazon Associate as well, and I can tell you that even large companies are in blatant violation of their rules without being banned.

They tend to write their legalese to be excessively prohibitive, so they have the leeway to exercise human judgment whenever they want without legal repercussions.

 

Yeah, that seems unlikely. Besides, why flail when you can just take your cat for a walk?

 

The more I think about it, the more I think that it is targeted at something very specific lol.

There's a method of scraping the site that doesn't generate a logged-in request, but does return the GID inf still, that some people abuse to scrape more than 1x/second. I think this will be geared at ending that.

Otherwise, they'd just lower the page-request limit to below 1 per second, not create some rule that doesn't need to exist when you already have a way of capping results returned.

 

I'm finishing this 1.12 and returning the other 10. Gonna go get a drink. Commences in 5 minutes.

 

It's language that they put in there so IF they need to use it, they can. I'm not worrying about it.

 

OMG!!!

 

Honestly, the wording is probably in there for the worst case offenders, as an excuse to point to. If someone is running a scraper at like 500ms causing PREs 24/7, then that would be a red flag (and a poor one at that, all those PREs and not catching any HITs lol).

Time will tell.