Question

I’m trying to set up Rturk to outsource some work to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. When I try to create my HITs, I keep running into t he following error in console:

RestClient::BadRequest: 400 Bad Request

When I copy the URL and paste it in my browser to get the response, I get the following message:

This user is not authorized to perform the requested operation

Do you guys have any idea what could be happening here? I am following the rturk documentation on github. https://github.com/mdp/rturk Is it possible that the gem has to be updated?

RTurk.setup(ENV['AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'], ENV['AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY_ID'], :sandbox => true)

  hit = RTurk::Hit.create(
    :title => "Sample turk",
    :assignments_duration => 1.hour,
    :expires_at => 1.day.from_now
  ) do |hit|
    hit.lifetime = 1.day
    hit.assignments = 1
    hit.description = "Test description."
    hit.keywords = "places, search, map, location"
    hit.question(mturk-fb_path, :frame_height => 750)
    hit.reward = reward
    if approval_rate
      hit.qualifications.add :approval_rate, { :gt => approval_rate }
    end         if abandoned_rate
      hit.qualifications.add :abandoned_rate, { :lt => abandoned_rate }
    end
    if is_us
      hit.qualifications.add :country, { :eql => "US" }
    end
  end    
}

Answer 1

A couple things might be going on here:

• I don’t believe :assignments_duration and :expires_at are valid options. You should be using hit.duration to specify the amount of time a worker has to complete a hit once they accept it and hit.lifetime to set the amount of time until the hit will expire.
• It might just be a typo in your post, but mturk-fb_path is not a valid ruby variable name. (can’t use a dash)

Try starting off with the simplest example that you can build off of once you get it working. This example from rturk should be a good start: https://github.com/mdp/rturk#creating-hits.

Also, I definitely recommend reading through the mturk docs for creating a hit: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/2011-10-01/AWSMturkAPI/ApiReference_CreateHITOperation.html.