Resources Beyond mTurk

There are several places beyond mTurk that may help you in your Turking quests:

1. Turker Nation: A mature, well-established forum for Workers.
2. Mechanical Turk Sandbox: The official test & development site. Everything looks and acts as if it’s the regular mTurk, but you don’t get paid for doing or posting HITs. It’s like monopoly money. It will prompt you to create an account on the Sandbox if you want to play around. However, you just use your Amazon login yet again.
3. Amazon Web Services Developer Connection -Mechanical Turk Forum: The official forum for mTurk Requesters. Very technical discussions about how to post HITs, the mTurk APIs, and other Requester coding issues. Amazon responds to technical questions here very quickly. Also, Amazon posts update notifications here. Useful for workers to get an understanding of what Requesters go through.
4. Turkers Forum: A new forum created at the end of February 2007. Doesn’t have too many discussion threads yet, but it’s worth keeping an eye on. Appropriately enough, this Forum advertised and started populating threads via a HIT on mTurk.

Don’t forget as well, that many HITs on mTurk are through companies whose business models rely on mTurk. These Requesters might have more resources and information on their home pages.

If you’re thinking of posting your own HITs, these resources are specifically for the Requester side:

1. AWS Developer Forum: (mentioned above)
2. Command Line Tools: Open source toolkit to make writing HITs much easier. Download through svn.
3. mTurk API Tools in Other Languages: PHP, Perl and Java.
   
4. HIT-Builder.com: Hit-Builder offers more features than the standard mTurk requester interface. You can also hire them to help develop your HITs.
5. von Kempelen: Company offers HIT designing and posting services.
6. Dolores Labs: Offers HIT data collection services. Has many examples of test HITs.
   

If you know of any other useful Turking resources, post a comment, and if it’s worthy, we’ll add it to our list!