Tell HN: Mechanical Turk bans asking people for website reviews.

8 points by gotobeach 14 years ago | 5 comments

A few days ago I posted a job on Mturk with a link to an very early draft of my website that I wanted feedback on. My job contained three text fields for people to enter their opinions and feedback on my site. I solicited absolutely no personal information in any way. Below is the message I received from them this morning. So what service can I use to crowdsource early-stage design reviews now?

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

Your Human Intelligence Tasks "Collect information about a website and provide summary." have been removed from the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace because they violated the terms of our HIT listing policy. The removal could be due to many reasons, including but not limited to:

* requiring disclosure of the Worker's identity or e-mail address, either directly or indirectly

* requiring registration at another website or group

* asking Workers to post an advertisement, review or comment on a website

* directly or indirectly promoting a site, service, or opinion or engaging in unsolicited contacting of users

* requiring a Worker to download or install an application

* violating the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote or like something)

* having explicit or offensive content, for instance nudity, without having the Adult Content Qualification

* asking Workers to solicit third parties * generating "referred" site visits or click-through traffic

* asking workers to take action to manipulate a search engine's relationship data

* violating copyrights

* disrupting or degrading the operation of any website or internet service

* creating a security risk for Mechanical Turk, any Mechanical Turk user, or any third party

You can find more information on our terms of service here: https://requester.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies

You can also learn more about invalid HITs by reading this blog post on the Mechanical Turk blog: http://mechanicalturk.typepad.com/blog/2010/12/some-thoughts-on-invalid-hits-.html

If you continue to post Human Intelligence Tasks that violate the terms of our HIT listing policy, your account will be suspended.

Sincerely, Amazon Mechanical Turk http://requester.mturk.com/ 1200 12TH AVE South, SUITE 1200 SEATTLE, WA 98144-2734 USA

d0ne 14 years ago |

http://feedbackarmy.com/ and http://www.usertesting.com/

ig1 14 years ago |

Plenty of people use MT for this purpose so chances are that it was something specific to do with your site or questions that got flagged.

leeHS 14 years ago |

I've used feedbackarmy, and I highly recommend them. The feedback was worth every penny (about a buck per feedback) and the customer service was great.

imp 14 years ago | |

I've used feedback too, but it's just a wrapper around Mechanical Turk. If there was a system-wide banning of website reviews on MT, it would take out feedbackarmy also.

fezzl 14 years ago |

Don't forget http://www.feedbackroulette.com.