I’ve been running an experiment on Mechanical Turk. I have several different versions of the same HIT that I’ve been using for months with no problems. I don’t direct workers to a different website or server… my code is running within MTurk. But suddenly, starting last week, workers can no longer submit my HITs. Instead of the HIT just running in the browser like it’s supposed to, clicking the Accept HIT button downloads an HTML file. If a worker opens the downloaded file and runs through the task, they are unable to submit it.

I heard about this issue from two workers who reached out to me, and I’ve since replicated it in the sandbox. But I don’t know what has changed. The same issue is now happening with all of my older HITs, which ran without problems. Including one that I ran earlier in the same week, before this started happening. It worked as intended one day and not the next. Since I didn’t change anything in my code at all, I’m not sure how to troubleshoot this problem. Does anyone have any insight or suggestions?