Sorry in advance if this has been proposed before. One great benefit of Pavlovia is that it furthers open science by allowing task materials to be easily shared. If authors include links to GitLab repositories in their manuscripts, then readers who already use Pavlovia can easily fork the author’s tasks and run them in just a few minutes.
However, this could be even easier. Authors could include a link to the task itself in their manuscript, so readers can simply click the paper’s link and try taking the experiment themselves. The downside to this is that authors without institutional licenses may not want to spend credits (or authors with licenses may not know the licenses will always be renewed).
Hence, it would be cool if the experiment dashboard allowed authors to create a link to a free “no-data-saving and also frozen” version of the task (possibly also anonymized). This could potentially have an upfront cost for authors if needed. Redirects could also be disabled, which I figure would effectively prevent them from being used to collect any genuine participants; although this would be a downside for multi-task studies.
I’m not familiar with how technically challenging this would be to implement. The only other downside to this, I see, is that potentially some random people on the internet (non-psychologists) could find some type of use for it and waste server energy (e.g., using it to host games on the web or whatever). However, I figure this type of abuse is detectable and preventable - e.g., maybe with some upper cap on how many times it can be used per day and repeated violations of that cap could lead to the task being flagged.