Soft Blocks vs. Hard Blocks

Soft Blocks

These DO NOT harm your mturk account. A soft block is merely put in place by a requester in order to prevent you from working on one of their HITs. This can be because you have already done a similar HIT for them in the past. They want a wide range of responses, or maybe you have already done all of the available work for a requester.

So when you hit "Accept Hit" and get the following message: 

The Requester _____________ has chosen to prevent you from working on any of this Requester's HITs. There are a variety of reasons for Requesters to prevent particular Workers from completing their HITs.

DO NOT WORRY! Most of the time it is only a soft block and they are temporary.

Hard Blocks

You will receive an email from the Amazon Mechanical Turk Team around 7am if you have been hard blocked by a requester. These DO affect your mTurk account. If you get 3 of them within a reasonably short amount of time, your mTurk account will be suspended.

Below is the email you will receive if you have been hard blocked by a requester: 

Greetings from Mechanical Turk. We regret to inform you that you were blocked from working on HITs by the following requester(s):
______________

Requesters typically block Workers who submit poor quality work.

Requesters rely on Mechanical Turk for high quality work results. In order to maintain quality, we continuously monitor service activity. Should additional Requesters block you in the future, we may suspend your account. Please ensure your work quality is at a high standard. We encourage you to read the HIT instructions and follow them carefully.

We realize that this block may be a onetime occurrence for you. Should you maintain high work quality with no further complaints for the next few months we will dismiss this event.

Regards, The Mechanical Turk Team