Long time lurker and 3 year turker. And unfortunately my 3 years have been far from productive according to some of the personal earnings I have been seeing displayed here at the forum. I know I'm doing it wrong and its because I'm not doing batches.
If you don't mind telling me, is there a optimal setup for scanning batch hits and surveys at the same time? I thought I read somehwere that Hit Finder is best for surveys and Hit forker is good for batches? Does it really matter?
Hi, welcome.
I don't think it really matters what you use, to be honest. HIT Forker is just a fork of HIT Finder, so they pretty much do the same thing. There are different ways you could go about finding batches though, but I think it sorta depends on how much screen real estate you have.
Personally, I usually just use a single instance of HIT Finder to find everything. I set it to search for anything that pays at least 1c and has at least 1 HIT in the batch (so pretty much everything shows up). HIT Finder shows how many HITs are in a batch, so if I see something building up with a lot of HITs, I'll generally take a look at it to see if it's any good. Using this method creates a lot of clutter in your search results that needs to be sifted through, though. I like to look for common terms that show up in HIT titles/descriptions of batches that I like to work on and I add those terms to my include list. Liberal use of the block list also helps.
Another method you could use is running multiple instances of HIT Finder/HIT Forker. The idea is you use one for surveys and one for batches, each with their own settings to better find what you're looking for. I do this on occasion where I'll put HIT Finder up in another window and set it to look for only batches that have at least 100 HITs or something, and I'll set it so it plays an audio alert any time something new pops up. Then I don't have to constantly be looking at HIT Finder to notice that a batch is going up.
Also, if you're looking for batches, always make sure HIT Finder/HIT Forker/whatever you use is set to show all HITs (not just stuff that you're qualified for). A lot of batches will have qual tests on them and you won't ever even see them if you're only searching for stuff that you're qualified for.
