TOS Trial and Error: Learning the hard way

You might recall our recent post where we reprinted the Mechanical Turk Terms of Service (they call it a 'Participation Agreement').  If you were looking closely, you might have seen a few thousand words which didn't actually lay out the do's and don't of using the site.  So, you probably did like this guy, and learned where the walls were by crashing your car right into them:

Really Sad about account suspension

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Hi all, I just started turking this week. I think it's fun, I love data entry, been doing it in one form another for years.

Anyhow, I was just working along and BAM! Account suspended. I've emailed Amazon, no reply (except the auto reply).

Is there any hope? I LOVE Amazon. Been a customer for YEARS. I'm honest, not a robot, live in the USA, etc. I know, you've all heard that before. I've earned around $47 so far (still in my account, not able to transfer it). Not a fortune, but yes, a lot of time put into it.

All of my stats looked fine. I did get blocked by one requester (elki media I think it was) because it was my second day and I put my answer in the comments section and not the text area by the photo.

I really enjoy this type of work. I'm so sad and disappointed I got suspended! Is there hope to get unblocked? So sad they would do this, you'd think they could easily check my Amazon account to see I'm a real person who's been a good customer for years. Happiness is receiving an Amazon box in the mail!  link 

Hi all, here is an update.

mTurk un-suspended me w/a note that says they suggest I reread their rules. Which I did. (more below)

However, when my mTurk account was suspended, my Amazon payments account was suspended. I only knew this because when I logged into mTurk it told me so. I could log into my payments account with no problems and saw no errors or reasons why it was suspended. It took payments 1-2 days to unsuspended that account. Amazon payments did not tell me why my account was suspended.

Neither mTurk or payments informed me via email that my accounts were suspended. I only learned this by the sudden suspended screen as I was doing hits.

I did reread the mturk rules to see if I had violated them in any way. I couldn't see anything obvious, but here is a possibility. I have both a laptop and a desktop. I move back and forth between them on a regular basis. Could it possibly be that Amazon thought I was two people working on hits at the same time on the same account? I'll be logging out on the computers when I leave mTurk and use a different computer from now on. Although one could see that no hits were submitted at the same time, simultaneously, or within seconds, of each other. That was all I could think of.

I'm happy to be turking again and hopefully there won't be any problems in the future.  link

Moral of the story:  read the terms of service?  Really?  This is the antithesis of user-interface best practices, letting people walk into the mines to figure out where not to step.  Amazon, you wouldn't stand for this on any of your other sites.  Why here?  Jeff....????