Customization of the "Maximum number of workers reached" Screen

roger_hauber

Hi,

I was wondering, if there was a way to customize what is displayed, when workers try to access a link to a batch, that has already reached the maximum amount of workers set in the batch properties. I am running the study in German and it would be nice to display text in German and also contain something less technical and more along the lines of "we are sorry, but enough participants have already participated in this study"..

Is this easily possible?

And a different question but also concerning batch/worker organisation: is there a way to remove individual workers from a batch? I seem to only be able to remove worker's results but would like to "reset" the batch to zero workers.

Thank you in advance,

Roger

kri

Hi Roger,

About you first question, customization of the max batch workers reached message: unfortunately not, there is no easy way to customize this. It's hard-coded into JATOS without the possibility to configure it.

And about the second question: It's not possible to delete workers in JATOS, only their results. There is a reason for this restriction: deleting workers could lead to a mess in the database. Workers and Results are separate entities in the database. And the same worker might have taken part in (say) two studies A and B, and the experimenter deleting the worker from Experiment A might not even have access to experiment B.

But you can always create a new batch and start over again with zero workers. Or you can just increase the 'Max total workers' in your current batch.

Best,

Kristian

elisa

Hi Roger,

I just had a thought, as a workaround to the fact that, as Kristian said, that "batch complete" message is hard-coded in JATOS and you can't change it.

I don't know how you coded your study and how comfortable you are with JS, but you could do the following:

• Don't use the max workers limit in JATOS.
• Instead, add a first (gatekeeper) component to your study.
• Every time a participant completes the study (you could even try to have some basic checks in the client side to see if this is a result that you'd like to keep, like number of trials completed, proportion of correct responses, or mean RT), increase a counter in the batch session data (or, better yet, add an element to the batch session data JSON, to prevent concurrency issues)
• Every time a new participant starts the study, the first gatekeeper component will check the state of the batch session data. If it has enough participants, it will display the message you want, in German, and with pretty formatting. It will also end the study. If there are not enough workers, then continue to component 2, where you run the study.

This is not complicated but if you've written the study with (e.g.) OSWeb you might have to hack it a bit. We can help if you need more details.

Hope this helps

Elisa

elisa

Hi Roger

(Argh, I added an answer and it got deleted. I'll try again.)

I have an idea that might help as a workaround for the hard-coded "batch complete" error message. It does require a bit of JS skills, but it's not complicated at all.

• Remove the max workers limit in JATOS.
• After each study finishes, register this in the batch session data. You could even make it dependent on the data quality (which seems to be what you're doing) and (e.g.) increase the value of a counter only if participants completed at least X% of the trials, or had enough response accuracy, etc.
• Add a first component to your study. This will be a gatekeeper. It will check the current value in the batch session data and, based on that either (1) display the message you want, in German and nicely formatted or (2) redirect participants to component 2, where the actual task takes place.

If you need more details or help implementing it, let us know.

Best

Elisa

roger_hauber

Hi Elisa and Kristian,

thanks for getting back to me so quickly!

The workaround you mentioned sounds promising, I will weigh implementing it and the time that will take against leaving it with the default "max workers reached"-notification. I'm not too familiar with JATOS right now, it would take a bit of getting into it and we were hoping of getting the study online before the week is done.

I appreciate your help!

Best,

Roger