Experiment ends due to 'irregularities'

[mbreen]

I am currently running a long (45-60 min) study with kids ages 6-10. Eight have taken it, but 3 show up as 'Abandoned.' One of the 'abandoned' participants emailed me to say that the experiment ended due to the 'detection of irregularities.' This also happened when we were testing the experiment, and I had assumed it was due to the experiment timing out, and so I increased the allowable duration to 120 minutes. But the participant who emailed me was only 45 minutes in when the experiment abruptly ended.
What causes this early termination? Is there anything I can change in the code to keep this from happening?
Thank you!

[Ting]

Hi!

In past occurrences of such events, it was almost invariably because the participants took a break in the middle of the study, to the extent that the computer went to sleep (some modern laptops on battery can go to sleep rather quickly; Chromebooks and newer Macbooks are the culprits usually - when on battery, they sleep after no user action for only a couple of minutes). When the computer goes to sleep, the FF study loses connection to the server. There's an internal setting where a loss of connection for 10 consecutive minutes will trigger this irregularity warning and end the study.

Of course, either the participant's internet going down or FindingFive's servers going down might result in the same outcome. But we are not aware of recent incidents where our servers are down for more than 10 minutes.

In the preview session where this issue occurred, did it occur out of nowhere without you or your RA taking a break? We have heard of cases where researchers were testing a study, and then left for a meeting, and then came back to see this error. If you can roughly recall when you previewed the study, we can look up the server logs and see what happened.

Can you also send us an email (to [email protected]) with the ID of the production session, where your participants had issues? We can usually tell whether the participants took an excessively long break by looking at the server logs.

Thanks!

[mbreen]

---

Hi!

In past occurrences of such events, it was almost invariably because the participants took a break in the middle of the study, to the extent that the computer went to sleep (some modern laptops on battery can go to sleep rather quickly; Chromebooks and newer Macbooks are the culprits usually - when on battery, they sleep after no user action for only a couple of minutes). When the computer goes to sleep, the FF study loses connection to the server. There's an internal setting where a loss of connection for 10 consecutive minutes will trigger this irregularity warning and end the study.

Of course, either the participant's internet going down or FindingFive's servers going down might result in the same outcome. But we are not aware of recent incidents where our servers are down for more than 10 minutes.

In the preview session where this issue occurred, did it occur out of nowhere without you or your RA taking a break? We have heard of cases where researchers were testing a study, and then left for a meeting, and then came back to see this error. If you can roughly recall when you previewed the study, we can look up the server logs and see what happened.

Can you also send us an email (to [email protected]) with the ID of the production session, where your participants had issues? We can usually tell whether the participants took an excessively long break by looking at the server logs.

Thanks!