Prolific Bugs

Hey there, since yesterday I experience some trouble in my Prolific Account, which makes me extremely nervous as I have an active study.

First, I topped up my account and the payment was also visible on my credit card, but not in my Prolific Account.
Now, I am not able to log in into my Prolific Account. Every time I try to log in I receive the note “500 - Looks like we’re having some issues”.
My co-Worker is able to log in into our workspace, but our active study disappeared.

Can you assist me with this issue?

Thanks!

Dear Jessica
Welcome to the forums.

I am very sorry but with this sort of bug I am afraid I can’t be of much (or any) help.

I would recommend clearing your cookies, changing your browser, trying a different computer, and above all contacting support
https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-gb/requests/new

Could the active study be in a different workspace?

Tim

Hi Tim,

thanks for the answer.
I am able to log in into the account of my co-workers but not with my account. This means, that every thing should be fine with the browser, cookies etc - the problem must definitely be on the side of Prolific.
Every time I try to log in with my account I receive the note that this is not possible.

Since you introduces the Workspaces Prolific is facing so many problems.

Could you please help me here?

Thanks

Jessica

I am not at all qualified to help with site bugs.

Clutching at straws…

One other thing, which is probably not connected but,
I think that Prolific is sensitive to logins to different
accounts from the same browser/IP ** in regard to
participant accounts .** I wonder if such checks are
applied to multiple researcher account logins from the
same computer/browser.

If you were experiencing the 500 error prior to logging in
with your colleagues account then obviously the fact that
you attempted to login with both accounts is unconnected.

Workspaces are a new sophisticated feature so there are likely
to be bugs.

In the past it was possible to have support requests fast-tracked
by contacting the forum leader (Josh then Jon) but now there is
no forum leader. There is a possibility (only a possibility) however
that if you message @Jane_Hillman with your support ticket number
she may asked support to put you to the front of the queue.

In the past there have been others with similarish problems

  1. Cured (I guess by contacting support
    Code 500 and 404 errors since April 15

  2. Cured after a certain amount of time
    Prolific GUI issues - #3 by ejb

  3. From those who are using the API
    The Prolific API is Live! Give us your thoughts :) - #18 by jul

  4. From a participant sub-reddit, every now and again Prolific has issues
    https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney/comments/9difwd/prolificac_very_slow_site_and_error_500/

I am sorry I can’t help you more,
m(._.)m

Tim

Hi Jessica,

Sorry to hear about this.

I’m the person in the first post listed above (by Tim). It was the same issue. I kept seeing 500 errors for my account across different computers and IP addresses, but it was ok when I logged into a different account.

I contacted Prolific support (many times), and they did something on the backend to fix this. I had an active study, too. I basically messaged all of them to apologize, saying I’m sorry that approval would be delayed.

I think my problem occurred because I was doing bulk approval (and didn’t have enough money).

I was told it might be that I used VPN? Someone suggested that cleaning up caches and leaving the account there for 24 hours would fix the problem.

Of course, as you can see, I was using multiple accounts, which might raise the issue as Tim pointed out.

Hi Tim, hi Phil,

thank you for your answers and your support.

I don’t use different accounts, I just tried if I am able to log in to a different account to exclude Browser issues.
I already contacted support multiple times but they seem quite busy at the moment. I think I have to wait until Prolific can fix the issue in the backend. I assume that there must be problems such as you observed.

Thank you both again for your time.

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