Error message when quitting the experiment under certain conditions

Online experiments
1

Description of the problem:

In my online experiment, there is a 1 minute break at trial intervals. Once the participant does not press the space bar to continue within 1 minute, the experiment will end immediately.

I add the code snippet in the End Routine part of the break routine:
if ((countdown_number === 0)) {
psychoJS.quit({message: ‘You waited too long! The experiment will end now and you won't be paid.’});
}

And I got the error message flashes for a second before the ending message:
Unfortunately we encountered the following error

  • when terminating the experiment
  • when flushing participant’s logs for experiment xx/xx
  • when uploading participant’s log for experiment xx/xx
  • Logs for this experiment have been saved more recently than allowed by the throttling period

Additional info:
I made the experiment save periodically (every 5mn) on Pavlovia, not sure if it’s relevant or not.
The data was actually being saved correctly as .csv file, but I did not check the .gz file

Thank you in advance for the advice!

2

This sounds very relevant since the error seems to be due to data having been saved too recently.

3

I had the same error yesterday (in my case when quitting the experiment upon completion) and I was also using the “save periodically” function. Maybe if the attempt to save on quit happens within a short time of a previous automatic save, it’s rejected by the server based on limits of how often data can be saved for the same run?

4

I’ve created a bug report for this.

Please could you confirm that your error came from a natural completion of the final routine as opposed to psychoJS quit in a code component or pressing escape.

5

Hi, not to resurrect a dead thread, but I experienced this issue today where the study came to its natural completion and a participant received this error with the periodic save turned on.

6

If your issue does match the issue in this thread then resurrecting it is a good approach. However, please add the details of your experience. What version? What custom code? What error message?

7

Creating the study in Version 2026.1.1 of PsychoPy studio. There’s plenty of custom code within the study, but nothing that has caused issue for participants once the pavlovia option for periodic saving has been turned off. However, there is custom code that is adding additional information to the csv output on each trial, but again I’ve had no issues with the other ~ 30 participants who completed this with periodic saving turned on, and nothing for the following 70 with it turned off.

I had one participant report the error:

"Unfortunately we encountered the following error:

when terminating the experiment
when uploading participant’s results for experiment: XXXXXX
Data for this experiment have been saved more often than allowed by the throttling period
Try to run the experiment again. If the error persists, contact the experiment designer."

This happened when the study finished and was closing. I have a partial record of their data which ended at 88 of 96 trials.