Alternative to manually freeing reserved credits?

Online experiments
1

Has anyone found a good workaround to manually freeing up reserved credits for participants who do not complete your study? Every time I post a study between Pavlovia and Prolific, I have dozens of participants emailing me because all the credits have been reserved within a few minutes even though there are still study slots available on Prolific. I can of course manually release credits, but it’s almost impossible to know which reserved credits are still in progress and which ones have been abandoned without waiting a few hours, when there are angry participants waiting for my response to free up a credit for them. Has anyone found a way to do this more efficiently? Or, could Pavlovia consider a way to track our credits more effectively so we can more easily see which ones are actually in progress?

Thanks for your time,
Lindsay

2

Hi Lindsay,

The credits release automatically after 24 hours. You need to add enough credits for the number of participants likely to start your study on one day, or limit the participants via your recruitment platform or invest in an institutional licence. Data collection is anonymous so I don’t think the individual credits can be tracked. It might be possible to change the expiration limit but then there would be a greater risk of data loss.