How to know when someone returns HIT?

Question

For an ExternalQuestion, when a worker views an HIT in preview mode, the url that is sent is something like:

/mturk?assignmentId=ASSIGNMENT_ID_NOT_AVAILABLE&hitId=3FSEU3P2NR0J4ISYGCVR597YQFLRRR

And then when the user Accepts the HIT, it updates the assignmentId and adds a workerId:

/mturk/?assignmentId=384PI804XS1ASN65RQHJZ77QLSES0H&hitId=3B9XR6P1WEVFQNSWCA0S33G3YCPBJ7&workerId=A1D23ERS0X4J9D&turkSubmitTo=https%3A%2F%2Fworkersandbox.mturk.com

Is there a way to know if an HIT is Returned and not finished? I tried emulating this behavior as a worker, and no request was send to my url. How would I tell then?

Answer 1

This was recently asked on the AWS Developer Forum . I'll copy a modified version of my answer from there:

You can use the Notifications API to trigger a notification every time a worker accepts an assignment. You could then catalog these notifications and compare them to the set of actual responses.

If you are hosting your HIT on your server, you could configure your server to log every view of a HIT (every view would log the workerId for the worker viewing it but with an ASSIGNMENTID_NOT_AVAILABLE value for the assignmentId , while accepted assignments that are returned would register an assignmentId that was never submitted to MTurk. For HITs hosted by AWS (eg, those created via the requester user interface, or setup as QuestionForm or HTMLQuestion HITs via the API), this option is not available to you.