Crowd-Workers browser extension discussion

CrowdWorkersEXT

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I'm here to start a discussion about our project, the Crowd-Workers extension. This extension helps you track your work on mTurk, and it also aggregates data from all who use it, so you can see what other workers are doing and join in on that work. The intent is to help you easily and quickly find other work to do to reduce the amount of time you spend searching for another HIT.

Features include:

Keep track of your hourly rate
Our extension will calculate your hourly rate, and let you track how much you make each day

Recommendations
We will recommend tasks that are best for you

Hourly rates for new tasks
We will aggregate statistics across all workers and give you an estimate of how much you'll make on new tasks

Will my work be rejected?
We track statistics about how often a Requester approves or rejects work to help you to decide whether you want to work for them

Find high paying work
Our web service lets you sort tasks by their hourly pay rate, and lets you follow good Requesters and ignore bad ones

When will I get paid?
Our web service gives you access to statistics about how long it typically takes a Requester before they pay their workers

Work History
We provide a searchable list of the HITs you've completed including PandA links

Goal Setting
Visualize your goals and how close you are to achieving them

Statistics Monitoring
See how your statistics are changing over time

Favourite List & Blacklist
Keep lists of Requesters you like and those you want to avoid

Alerts
Be notified when HITs are added to your queue or your queue is emptied

Is this HIT group good?
We also track statistics about each HIT group, such as how many HITs were rejected and average completion time

In light of wanting to increase transparency, we want to let you know that we currently have two known issues we're working on and should have an update to rectify this week:
- only hourly goal setting is working
- the In Progress section of the extension shows HITs that are already complete

Since they're minor issues, we thought we'd go ahead and reach out to the workers immediately knowing they'll be fixed soon.
I'm posting here to ask you all to please give the extension a try and let me know if you find it beneficial. I'd also love to hear your feedback on the features it already has and any you think it needs. Our intent is to boost the userbase so that the recommendations the extension gives you are of the highest quality. Any suggestions you have that would convince you to use the extension, if you do not already, would be a huge help. Our goal is to make Turking more lucrative for you through use of our extension.
 
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CrowdWorkersEXT

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Hey Turkers! We're running a sweepstakes for Turkers who give our extension a try. You can enter through our simple form and then use the extension for at least a week. On March 22nd we'll draw two winners and send them $25 Amazon.com gift cards. Refer your friends to get even more entries! Good luck to all who enter!

This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, mTurkCrowd.com or its staff. It is solely sponsored and administered by Crowd-Workers.com.
 
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clickhappier

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Hi again. :) This kind of thing isn't for me, but I see it has been getting quite a few positive reviews: CrowdWorkers - Chrome Web Store

Here's an issue I saw pointed out by one recent reviewer, though: "Hourly rate is a great feature, and will lead to requesters posting higher hourly rates if it becomes widespread. HOWEVER, because Hourly Rate puts the HITS with no calculated hourly rate at the top when filtered by hourly rate, this feature becomes useless (unless you want to search through hundreds of HITS to reach the one with a high hourly rate)."

Cross-reference links to MTG threads: 1, 2
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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Hi again. :) This kind of thing isn't for me, but I see it has been getting quite a few positive reviews: CrowdWorkers - Chrome Web Store

Here's an issue I saw pointed out by one recent reviewer, though: "Hourly rate is a great feature, and will lead to requesters posting higher hourly rates if it becomes widespread. HOWEVER, because Hourly Rate puts the HITS with no calculated hourly rate at the top when filtered by hourly rate, this feature becomes useless (unless you want to search through hundreds of HITS to reach the one with a high hourly rate)."

Cross-reference links to MTG threads: 1, 2
I saw that today as well. Those which show no hourly rate are actually in the correct spot as far as we can estimate. Obviously, it's really hard to calculate hourly rate as it is. We're doing our best to keep trying new ways to make it more accurate, though. Thanks for your input!
 
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CrowdWorkersEXT

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We've rolled out another new version this morning which fixes the two issues mentioned above. Please let us know what you think!
 
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CrowdWorkersEXT

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We've had such an overwhelming response that our servers are lagging a bit, and this is leading to refresh errors on AMT for new users. If you're having this issue we ask that you please wait until you're done working for today to install and Sync the extension (you'll find the button to do so both on the Analytics page of our website and in your extension menu, just click the CW icon to find it). Let it run overnight and you should be caught up by morning and the issue should resolve itself. Thanks for trying our extension out!
 
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CrowdWorkersEXT

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Just wanted to check in with you all and see if anyone has tried the extension yet. If so, any feedback? If not, any reasons why?
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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I saw a post yesterday asking if this extension is useful if you don't use Chrome regularly, and wanted to mention that since you can manually sync your HITs, you can just open Chrome to look at the HITs which are recommended, check out your goals and graphs (rejections/approvals, how much time you spend on AMT or forums, etc.), look at Requester information, and keep tabs on your blacklist/favorites.
 

jan

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I saw a post yesterday asking if this extension is useful if you don't use Chrome regularly, and wanted to mention that since you can manually sync your HITs, you can just open Chrome to look at the HITs which are recommended, check out your goals and graphs (rejections/approvals, how much time you spend on AMT or forums, etc.), look at Requester information, and keep tabs on your blacklist/favorites.
Are you collecting data and
what are you going to do with the data?
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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It is a university research project and all data is only accessible by myself and my team. No profile is built, the information is aggregated and will only be accessed by my team in order to determine how much unpaid time is being spent searching for work versus how much is being spent actually working. It will not be shared with other parties without anonymizing the workers or aggregating the information.
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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From the FAQ:

What information does the extension collect?
The extension is focused on helping workers finding high paying work by computing the average hourly rates of the HITs you and other CrowdWorkers complete. All of the information is collected with this goal in mind, therefore we do not collect any personally identifying information, such as your Social Security Number, address, phone number, email address or name.

Will the CrowdWorkers Chrome extension track my activity on other websites?
The extension is only active when you are working on crowd-workers.com, mturk.com, or a select few MTurk-related sites and forums. The third-party sites that the extension tracks are turkernation.com, mturkgrind.com, reddit.com, mturkforum.com, turkopticon.ucsd.edu, and mturklist.com. The only information saved is the amount of time you spend on these sites, not your activities while on the sites. This information is used for academic research purposes, to help understand how you and other Turkers can most effectively find higher paying HITs.

Will my personal information from mTurk or the Turker forums be given to third parties?
None of your information will ever be sold to third parties. All information collected is anonymized and only provided in aggregate form to academic researchers who work with the creators of the extension.

What will the information that is collected be used for?
The information we collect is used to populate the statistics found on the Crowd Worker website, such as hourly rate and estimated time to complete a HIT.
 

Vladimir Támara

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In order to audit the information you collect is the chrome extension open source? If it is where are the sources?
 
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CrowdWorkersEXT

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From the FAQ:

What information does the extension collect?
The extension is focused on helping workers finding high paying work by computing the average hourly rates of the HITs you and other CrowdWorkers complete. All of the information is collected with this goal in mind, therefore we do not collect any personally identifying information, such as your Social Security Number, address, phone number, email address or name.

Will the CrowdWorkers Chrome extension track my activity on other websites?
The extension is only active when you are working on crowd-workers.com, mturk.com, or a select few MTurk-related sites and forums. The third-party sites that the extension tracks are turkernation.com, mturkgrind.com, reddit.com, mturkforum.com, turkopticon.ucsd.edu, and mturklist.com. The only information saved is the amount of time you spend on these sites, not your activities while on the sites. This information is used for academic research purposes, to help understand how you and other Turkers can most effectively find higher paying HITs.

Will my personal information from mTurk or the Turker forums be given to third parties?
None of your information will ever be sold to third parties. All information collected is anonymized and only provided in aggregate form to academic researchers who work with the creators of the extension.

What will the information that is collected be used for?
The information we collect is used to populate the statistics found on the Crowd Worker website, such as hourly rate and estimated time to complete a HIT.
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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I just wanted to let anyone using the extension know that we've overcome the changes mTurk made to their login algorithms and our extension works again. Please delete the extension and reinstall it from Crowd-Workers.com. If that doesn't work, delete it, clear your cache, then reinstall it. Thanks for being such loyal users! :)
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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We had some issues with our server over the last few days, but now it's resolved and all is working perfectly. Thanks for your patience!
 

jan

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So, how many of your users are turkers (signed up on their own) - vs. those who took a class and were asked to sign up?
 

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So, how many of your users are turkers (signed up on their own) - vs. those who took a class and were asked to sign up?
Students only sign up for mTurk itself (to teach them how Turking is so when they create HITs they'll better understand how to make them worker-friendly), none of them use Crowd-Workers. All of our users are actual Turkers.
 

jan

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Students only sign up for mTurk itself (to teach them how Turking is so when they create HITs they'll better understand how to make them worker-friendly), none of them use Crowd-Workers. All of our users are actual Turkers.
But they wrote the reviews (on the chrome website).
 

CrowdWorkersEXT

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Honestly, I don't know anything about that, I'm just a member of the team working on the extension. That disappoints me to hear if true, though.
 
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jan

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Honestly, I don't know anything about that, I'm just a member of the team working on the extension. That disappoints me to hear if true, though.
It's on the grading rubric for the class (they got extra credit for writing/leaving a review)
1 point extra.
 
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