Empty component output
Dear Jatos-community,
I have been observing some behavior of Jatos which I cannot quite understand. My experiment works well (at least from what I can observe), during testing I have not received any errors and all data were saving fine. The experiment was tested on several computers (different OS) and different browsers and the output in the Jatos GUI was always as expected. Yesterday I sent out the link to a handful of volunteers to have the link checked before putting the experiment on Prolific. This has now resulted in several empty data entries such as the following:
I time-coordinated with one participant so that I could check Jatos the moment they used the link. For this person (I do not know about the others), an empty entry was created first (2571), then the logging worked fine (2571). Of course, I do not know 100% that the component 2571 was created by the same person, I just assumed because of temporal proximity. The participant did not experience any odd behavior, the experiment start straight away.
Interestingly though for the other participants I did not get any proper data, just the empty entries as in the first picture.
Does someone know what might be a plausible reason as to why an empty entry might occur?
Thanks in advance for any comments.
All the best,
Christina
Comments
Hi Christina,
I'm not sure this is the reason -in particular, I'm not sure I would expect an empty entry-, but could it be that you sent the link over slack/facebook/whatsapp/Gmail? Some of these services open the link (to produce the little snippet with a picture that you sometimes see).
You're using a General Multiple link so this will not have prevented people from actually accessing the study, but we've even seen this behaviour where a Personal Single link gets 'used up' once by slack and people can no longer run the study.
Best
Elisa
Hi Elisa,
Thanks for your quick response. Interesting - I sent the link via email (Outlook) to a collaborator who distributed it amongst his research assistants. I do not know but would not be surprised if he used Slack for that. I'll ask to see whether this was the case.
Best,
Christina