Mechanical Turk externalquestion error when submitting hit

Question

I have managed to create a HIT with an external question that calls an html file hosted in an S3 server. I have worked in the sandbox environment. When I create the hit, I get the following error when I try to submit the hit as a worker:

There was a problem submitting your results for this HIT.

This HIT is still assigned to you. To try this HIT again, click "HITs Assigned To You" in the navigation bar, then click "Continue work on this HIT" for the HIT. If this problem persists, you can contact the Requester for this HIT using the "Contact" link above.

To return this HIT and continue working on other HITs, click the "Return HIT" button.

I have already read multiple forums trying to figure out the problem. When I check out the source in the developer tools, it seems to have all the necessary parameters set:

</style><iframe height="400" scrolling="auto" frameborder="0" align="center" src="https://BUCKET.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html?assignmentId=34J10VATJGBKANG4MDCHRA6ME53QIH&amp;hitId=3N2YPY1GI6BYD6C5MRBYOYBJJSEEVE&amp;workerId=A1YJU5SNGQQP00&amp;turkSubmitTo=https%3A%2F%2Fworkersandbox.mturk.com" name="ExternalQuestionIFrame"></iframe>

Also, I made sure I don't have any button named 'submit'. Any ideas of how I could debug this thing?

Answer 1

The issue here is usually that you're not submitting the appropriate information back to MTurk. You need to send the assignmentId parameter in addition to at least one other named field. I often just add a &foo=bar (or similar) to the end of the submit URL. So you should be submitting to something like:

https://workersandbox.mturk.com/mturk/externalSubmit?assignmentId=34J10VATJGBKANG4MDCHRA6ME53QIH&foo=bar

That's for the sandbox. For the live server, switch the base URL to https://www.mturk.com.

Answer 2

Amazon MT HITs seems to be printing a generic error message for a wide range of issues. This causes the problem to be particularity hard to debug.

For me, the error occurred since I was not assigning "name" attribute to my input elements in the form.

You must include the HTML name attribute in the input field definition. Make your name attributes descriptive because they are used as the column headings in the Results table.

If you are using the GUI to build and deploy your tasks, I recommend giving this document a good read and see if you have missed something.

MT Requestor UI guide

Hope this helps.