ProductRnR posts many different groups of HITs, primarily related to images (moderation, tagging, categorization, relevance evaluation). Their HITs use image files hosted on Bing/Microsoft servers; they are likely running projects to improve Bing search results.
Their requester account is linked to a Hotmail email address, where as far as I've heard, they apparently haven't read or replied to any worker messages in a long time; they just occasionally send out automated quality warning messages to some workers. The account seems to be largely running on autopilot, aside from someone occasionally adding a new task type to the mix.
They have dozens of quals, for their many varieties of HITs. Not all of them are still (or ever have been?) in use, but they're all automatically granted when you request them (or for a few, complete a test for them). (Also, it saying 'Qualified Users: 0' on some isn't an accurate indication of which they use, because unfortunately MTurk's programming doesn't update that number on some quals. ...but this no longer matters since in Dec 2015, Amazon took away workers' ability to see how many people have a qual entirely.)
Your scores on some of these quals will be automatically raised or lowered (for some, higher is bad; for others, lower is bad) to levels which no longer qualify for the relevant HITs if their algorithms decide you're working inaccurately or too quickly (even if still working accurately). Once reaching an ineligible value, these don't ever revert to eligible values AFAIK, so you can no longer work on that type of HIT for them, apparently forever (and as mentioned, they don't respond to emails requesting reevaluation).
RNR has a lot of different kinds of HITs, each with separate scores; once they lock you out of one type, you can move on to another. The easiest way to keep an eye on your scores for currently-available tasks is by looking at the ProductRnR requester search results page with 'show all details'.
RNR's low TO for fairness is due to their rejection habits years ago (circa 2012) before they switched to the qual-score-changing method instead, and some frustrated workers in the qual-score-changing period who thought it was unfair how their quals were changed to disqualify them even though they didn't have any HITs rejected. Also, their HITs tend to include a large quantity of items to work on for the pay, so what could've been a decent HIT with, say, 2 or 3 items in it, becomes a lame HIT with 18 items in it. But some people like them anyway.
There are userscripts which may help with a few of RNR's types of HITs:
- '(mTurk) ProductRnR School Appropriate HIT Helper' by taylus
- 'ProductRnR' by kadauchi
- '(mTurk) ProductRnR Query Image' by Young Tuga
- '(mTurk) ProductRnR HIT Helper' by Magnilucent
- 'RnR Script' by Tjololo
- 'productrnr' by Iamme
To better deal with their overloaded slow-loading HITs, you may also find one of these scripts helpful:
- '(mTurk) Show captcha and accept button ASAP' by Magnilucent
- 'mmmturkeybacon Make Accept Button Visible Immediately' by mmmturkeybacon
And there's a variety of AHK scripts for RNR in an MTF thread (largely from 2013; don't know how relevant they still are to the current formats).
When you encounter some containing numerous large GIFs, swole_hamster suggested some browser extensions/add-ons to help handle that, in Feb 2015:
Their requester account is linked to a Hotmail email address, where as far as I've heard, they apparently haven't read or replied to any worker messages in a long time; they just occasionally send out automated quality warning messages to some workers. The account seems to be largely running on autopilot, aside from someone occasionally adding a new task type to the mix.
They have dozens of quals, for their many varieties of HITs. Not all of them are still (or ever have been?) in use, but they're all automatically granted when you request them (or for a few, complete a test for them). (Also, it saying 'Qualified Users: 0' on some isn't an accurate indication of which they use, because unfortunately MTurk's programming doesn't update that number on some quals. ...but this no longer matters since in Dec 2015, Amazon took away workers' ability to see how many people have a qual entirely.)
Your scores on some of these quals will be automatically raised or lowered (for some, higher is bad; for others, lower is bad) to levels which no longer qualify for the relevant HITs if their algorithms decide you're working inaccurately or too quickly (even if still working accurately). Once reaching an ineligible value, these don't ever revert to eligible values AFAIK, so you can no longer work on that type of HIT for them, apparently forever (and as mentioned, they don't respond to emails requesting reevaluation).
RNR has a lot of different kinds of HITs, each with separate scores; once they lock you out of one type, you can move on to another. The easiest way to keep an eye on your scores for currently-available tasks is by looking at the ProductRnR requester search results page with 'show all details'.
RNR's low TO for fairness is due to their rejection habits years ago (circa 2012) before they switched to the qual-score-changing method instead, and some frustrated workers in the qual-score-changing period who thought it was unfair how their quals were changed to disqualify them even though they didn't have any HITs rejected. Also, their HITs tend to include a large quantity of items to work on for the pay, so what could've been a decent HIT with, say, 2 or 3 items in it, becomes a lame HIT with 18 items in it. But some people like them anyway.
There are userscripts which may help with a few of RNR's types of HITs:
- '(mTurk) ProductRnR School Appropriate HIT Helper' by taylus
- 'ProductRnR' by kadauchi
- '(mTurk) ProductRnR Query Image' by Young Tuga
- '(mTurk) ProductRnR HIT Helper' by Magnilucent
- 'RnR Script' by Tjololo
- 'productrnr' by Iamme
To better deal with their overloaded slow-loading HITs, you may also find one of these scripts helpful:
- '(mTurk) Show captcha and accept button ASAP' by Magnilucent
- 'mmmturkeybacon Make Accept Button Visible Immediately' by mmmturkeybacon
And there's a variety of AHK scripts for RNR in an MTF thread (largely from 2013; don't know how relevant they still are to the current formats).
When you encounter some containing numerous large GIFs, swole_hamster suggested some browser extensions/add-ons to help handle that, in Feb 2015:
" As some of you know already.. ProductRNR has this new fangled thing of loading very large, very CPU intensive GIFs in the adult hits once in a while. There are ways to stop this under both Firefox and Chrome!
Under Chrome you want the extensions Paused! and AutoGfy. One pauses the GIF and the other converts it to a gfy movie to save bandwidth.
Under Firefox you have Gfycat which automatically converts any GIF to a gpf to save bandwidth and CPU usage! There is also an option under about:config by changing image.animation_mode to none. "
Under Chrome you want the extensions Paused! and AutoGfy. One pauses the GIF and the other converts it to a gfy movie to save bandwidth.
Under Firefox you have Gfycat which automatically converts any GIF to a gpf to save bandwidth and CPU usage! There is also an option under about:config by changing image.animation_mode to none. "
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