It's been a few weeks since my first post regarding unfair Crowdflower policies and unfair and downright crooked task authors.

Are we any closer to a resolution?  Sure, CF and their reps are making noises and asking opinions, and even posting a few tasks that ask for feedback from the workers, but are they just placating us by throwing water on the flames in the hopes that this will blow over?  Will things remain unchanged after giving empty promises and false hope?

I know CF has it tough when dealing with the scam workers.  I remember reading in the old CF forum of a worker complaining of being banned.  Turns out he had copied and pasted gibberish into text boxes in a task. His excuse?  He was in a rush and didn't have time to type in the correct answers.  After my eyes finished rolling right out of my head, I thought to myself that this moron should not only be banned from Crowdflower, but from the internet as well.  Seriously.  In what world would that excuse be ok?  Was he really stupid enough to think that CF would give him a second chance?

I'm sure this wasn't an isolated incident, and that CF has to deal with that kind of crap on a daily basis.  What concerns me is that good workers are being lumped in with the bad.  Flags are handed out like cookies, CF denies responsibility and the workers have no recourse and no way to contact the TA.  mTurk may have its faults (not paying Canadians in real money is one of them, but I digress, and that's a topic for another blog) but at least they offer a way to contact a requester.

While I don't have the answers, I do think that things need to change.  There needs to be better training for the TAs, tasks need to be double and triple checked before going live, there needs to be a mechanism in place to dispute flags, there needs to be stricter guidelines for handing out flags.  Really, is submitting a task 5 seconds before some Top Secret Time Limit actually worthy of a flag?

If a worker is deliberately trying to scam like the example given above, that worker should be banned permanently.  But any other type of flag should have an expiry date.  As I mentioned a few weeks ago, even a bank robber can get parole - he isn't in prison for life.  Why should CF workers get life without parole? 

They shouldn't.