Added slots, no new participants

1

Hi there!

I have a question. I published a short, well-paying study for 30 participants, and had all my data within 30 minutes. I then used the “increase spaces” function to add 10 more participants (around 6pm ET), and not a single person started it yet (and it’s almost 10am ET now). Have you been in this situation before? Is this something about how Prolific works, or is this a bug?

Thanks!
Moshe

2

Hi! I’m also in a similar boat—Alloted 100 spaces, upped to 171. Since then, data collection has been very slow. I suspect that participants are not notified about the increased spaces; or your published study goes down in their list of eligible studies

3

Hi friend,

Thanks for replying :slight_smile: What I did is stop the study, copy it, and run it again with the number of remaining participants I want to recruit. It even automatically added the previous study as an exclusion criterion.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

4

Hi @mpoliak! When you stopped and copied the study again, did you have to pay for the remaining participants again?

Edit: I actually tried it and was able to recover my funds so that I could use the same amount for a new batch—thanks for this solution : ) Fingers crossed that participation rate is faster

1 Like
5

Dear Moshe and Rahul

Welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

While Moshe’s suggestion is a great workaround, and I am glad to hear that it works for Rahul too, I hope that Prolific are reading since this seems to be a bug: participants should be informed of the increased places and they were in the past.

I posted to support, just in case you have not.

Tim

6

Eleanor from Prolific support got back to me within a day writing as follows

Hi Timothy,

Thanks for reaching out and letting us know!

Rest assured, this is a bug we’re aware of and are working hard to fix. In the meantime, if you ever increase places on a study and find that this stalls data collection, do reach out to us and we’ll update the study to fix this issue.

I hope this helps! Feel free to post this information on the community forum if you think it would help other researchers.

Best wishes,
Eleanor

1 Like