whoops_yall

Whoops y'all is a psiTurk-compatible experiment for paying people when an experiment goes badly for some reason. You enter the workerIds of people who you owe money to, and you can reject all others. Payment is handled quickly and easily via psiTurk's command line features. When you make a whoops, use "whoops y'all"

See https://psiturk.org for more information about psiTurk.

How to use

Briefly, assuming you have psiturk installed, working, and have AWS credentials.

Clone the repo

1. git clone git@github.com:NYUCCL/whoops_yall.git

Make it yours

1. cd whoops_yall - change to the project folder
2. edit config.txt to your liking

• set host to 0.0.0.0 if you plan to run on the public internet,
• also fill in the contact_email_on_error
• set values for login_username and login_pw

1. edit the templates/ad.html file to reflect your university/organization and to identify yourself to workers
2. pip install shortuuid as a dependency

Update the database

1. psiturk - launch psiturk
2. [psiTurk server:off mode:sdbx #HITs:0]$ server on - start server
3. visit http://SERVER/whoopsyall_dashboard (e.g., http://localhost:22362/whoopsyall_dashboard)
4. login with the credentials you provided in the config.txt
5. enter worker ids and bonus amounts
6. listed below is a status list of where each person got in the reimbursement task. Also listed are "completion codes"... random codes you should send to worker who had problems to identify them uniquely.

Test the end-user code

1. psiturk - launch psiturk if it is not already running
2. [psiTurk server:off mode:sdbx #HITs:0]$ server on - start server if not already running
3. [psiTurk server:on mode:sdbx #HITs:0]$ debug - test it locally (will pop open a browser stepping you through)
4. [psiTurk server:on mode:sdbx #HITs:0]$ hit create - to create the hit on the AMT sandbox
5. Test the experiment by finding your listing on the Amazon sandbox (keep in mind the workerId and completion code must be valid)

Run live

1. If all is going well and looks how you expect, [psiTurk server:on mode:sdbx #HITs:0]$ mode - to switch to "live" mode
2. [psiTurk server:on mode:live #HITs:0]$ hit create - to create the hit on the live server, usually something like 0.01 (minimum price)
3. [psiTurk server:on mode:live #HITs:0]$ worker approve --hit <yourhitid> - to approve and pay everyone who has finished
4. [psiTurk server:on mode:live #HITs:0]$ worker bonus --hit <yourhitid> --auto - to assign bonuses to everyone who has completed the task correctly

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Alternatively, launch this experiment as a heroku app. This repository already contains the files necessary for heroku (Procfile, requirements.txt, and herokuapp.py).