Some participants are not able to take experiment on Pavlovia

Hello!

I am performing an experiment where participants are redirected from Sona to Qualtrics to Pavlovia ([Pavlovia], then Pavlovia again [Pavlovia]) and back to Sona. The experiment worked perfectly for 20 of the 30 participants (redirection links seem to be working).

However, for some reason, 10 participants were unable to take the experiment on Pavlovia. One of them contacted me saying that he gets a message stating that he does not have access to the study - when he is redirected from Qualtrics to Pavlovia. He is properly redirected to Pavlovia, but the experiment does not open for him (no access). Additionally, I have seen that all of those 10 participants took the Qualtrics several times, indicating that they probably tried to access Pavlovia multiple times, without success.

In order to test the experiment, I ran it in three different computers (two macOS and one Linux), in two different browsers (Chrome and Firefox), and they all worked fine. Safari had some problems opening the experiment on Pavlovia, so I recommended the participants to take the experiment in either Chrome or Firefox.

I could not find any similar issues here on the forum, so I am opening this new topic. Is there something that can be done? Should I just delete the experiment on Pavlovia and resynch from PsychoPy, (re)creating a new one? Could this problem be related to participants’ browser data (cache and cookies)?

Might those 10 participants have tested earlier versions of your study? If so, then an incognito tab would help. Otherwise, knowing the error message and the link from Qualtrics would help with debugging.

Maybe they could have tested earlier versions, but I am unsure. In the near future I will run the experiment again, and will try to contact the participants to further investigate.

The Qualtrics link can be seen below. Do you think it could be the problem? I followed your google Drive document with instructions on redirections.

\http://run.pavlovia.org/danielopeixoto/al_task/?participant=${e://Field/id}

Ignore the initial backslash (I just included so that the link could be visualized here).

That link looks fine. My only suggestions are cached older versions and unstable Internet connections.

You could ask previous participants to use an incognito tab or you could delete the local hidden.git file and folder and then sync to a new project with a different folder name.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Is there a way to skip the dialog box when running online?

Hi,

I am right now experiencing the same issue… anyone found a solution for this? Would be super grateful!

Best,
Moana

Hello Moanad,

I still did not find a solution. I am asking participants to run the experiment on Chrome. Interestingly, even so, some of them experience an error when they are redirected to Pavlovia:

“No information is available for this experiment. Either it does not exist or you do not have access to it.”

This is the default message when someone tries to open a Pavlovia project without having access to it (or when you try to run an experiment without the preceding run.pavlovia). Try opening your project on an anonymous tab, without having logged in.

Pavlovia # Error is expected (no access was given to participants)

https://run.pavlovia.org/username/project_name # Error should not be expected (participants are just taking the experiment)

My guess is that for some participants, the latter link is “transformed” into the first link when clicked, and I don’t know how or why.

If you discover anything, I would appreciate if you’d let me know how you dealt with the problem :slight_smile:

Best,

Daniel

Hi Daniel,

I have not discovered anything yet unfortunately. For me I think I also have a bit of a different issue? My participants seem to somewhat be registered by Pavlovia but then can’t do the task for whatever reason. I see that in the data, since they have a participant file, but this file is empty.

Do you or someone else have any thought on this maybe?

Thank you!
Moana:)