Randomization mixes the sentences in the csv file

[ecenur]

Hi,

We piloted a rating study with sliders yesterday. I have had no trouble on my own computer, but two participants got really weird mixed-up sentences for some reason. I can’t figure out why.

I had three csv files in the beginning and I was using rshuffle. I thought maybe that’s causing the problem and so I changed that. Now I have one csv file and I’m using randomize, but the problem continues.

I don’t know if I should try to use native-ibex latin-square design?

These agents had problems:

# USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1	Win64	x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.75 Safari/537.36
# USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux	Android 11	Redmi Note 9 Pro) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.79 Mobile Safari/537.36

No problems with these ones:

# USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0	Win64	x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.75 Safari/537.36
# USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh	Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.84 Safari/537.36 OPR/85.0.4341.47
# USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux	Android 12	M2101K6G) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/100.0.4896.79 Mobile Safari/537.36
# USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux	U	Android 12	tr-tr	Redmi Note 10 Pro Build/SKQ1.210908.001) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/89.0.4389.116 Mobile Safari/537.36 XiaoMi/MiuiBrowser/13.2.1-gn

Demonstration link: https://farm.pcibex.net/r/MbCFqf/

I hope you can help me. Thanks so much.

Ecenur

[Jeremy]

Hi Ecenur,

I think you might have been working on the project as I was taking a look at it, because the debugger once threw an error about not finding a csv table, which was consistent with the copy of your project I created (which had only one csv file) but then I refreshed the page and no longer saw the error, and the copy I created after that showed three csv files

I am not sure I understood your description of the problem: what do/did the “really weird mixed-up sentences” consist of? Do you mean that some row.questions come/came from lines in the table that had different values in their group cell?

Jeremy

[ecenur]

Yes, I’m sorry. I was just trying some things to find the cause of the problem.

I see I wasn’t clear. I’m sorry. What you described is close to what’s happening. So, some words of the questions in row.question get mixed up with other words of other questions. Sometimes there are even words that does not exist anywhere in my csv file but it’s still the correct language, just not grammatical.

Let’s say some questions consist of words={a, b, c, d, e, f, g}, and one question is supposed to be “a b c d e” but some participants are getting “a c m k e” or “a d f g e”. “m” and “k” are not even in any of the questions in the csv file. How did/do they get there??? Why did some of the actual words disappear?

And this is happening only on some devices, and not others. I’m so confused.

Could it have anything to do with utf-8 encoding in the csv files? I have to use non-English characters and that’s why I had to use csv utf-8, though I didn’t see anyone else have this problem. Confusing… I can’t think of anything that may cause this.

Thanks again.

Ecenur

[Jeremy]

Huh, this is a very weird problem indeed

Do you recognize those words that are absent from the csv files as words that *used* to be in the csv file at some point? I can’t see a pattern in the browser information of the participants that encountered the problem vs those who didn’t, but the farm is currently having glitches where it can save multiple copies of the same file: you only see one file listed in your project when editing it, but internally there can be several versions of it and the one that gets served to a participant can be random

My suggestion is you make sure you have the csv files that you want on your computer, then delete all csv files from your project on the farm (refresh the page after you delete a file and make sure it does not reappear in the project tree) and after that, upload the csv file(s) from your computer to your project

Let me know if the problem persists

Jeremy

[ecenur]

No, those words were never in any of the csv files I have used. I refresh the page after deleting and uploading (thanks to the auto-save problem). I deleted and reuploaded the files several times. I reduced them to one file and changed the code accordingly. So, the filename was different, too. I even created an empty project and uploaded main.js and csv files there. That didn’t work, either.

Do you think using the native-ibex latin-square design could work? Since the questions will be in main.js, there can’t be any retrieving problem, I guess.

Thank you so much.

Ecenur

[Jeremy]

Have you identified that the problem only occurs when you use a single csv file, but that it doesn’t occur when you use 3 csv files?

If you think having the table in main.js would help, you could use AddTable after ResetPrefix:

PennController.ResetPrefix(null)

AddTable("myTable", `column1,column2,column3
cell1row1,cell2row1,cell3row1
cell1row2,cell2row2,cell3row2`)

Replace "myTable" with whatever name you want to use, and make sure you also reference that name as the first argument of your Template command. Note that spacing and linebreaks matter between the two ` characters in AddTable, so follow the same format as above

Jeremy

[ecenur]

Thank you so much Jeremy. AddTable didn’t solve the issue for the affected devices, but I’ve finally found what is causing it.

Their Google Chrome had the “Offer to translate pages that aren’t in a language you read” option on and that was translating the pages into Turkish, as if the pages were in English when in fact they were in Turkish. So, that’s how they got the weird sentences. It wasn’t anything to do with the files or the farm.

Maybe this will be something to add to the documentation… Anyway, thanks again.

Best,
Ecenur

[Jeremy]

Hi Ecenur,

Thanks for the feedback. This is actually an issue that was raised in the past. Unfortunately there is not much one can do about it, as it takes place on the participant’s end and I don’t know of a way to make the script detect the presence of such a translation feature

Jeremy

[ecenur]

Hi Jeremy,

I have seen that <html translate="no"> tag should work for Google Chrome’s auto-translate feature. However, I couldn’t find where to add it in my experiment. So, I created an empty experiment to try a few things out. But then I started getting “Internal Server Error” messages. At first, I thought it was temporary, so I logged out. Now, I can’t even log in to my account. When trying to access the experiments, it keeps giving this error: “We’re sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information.”

I googled this and it seems to result when there is a corrupted file. I guess I broke something in my account. If you need to delete the experiments, I have backups. I would just like to keep my username. Sorry to trouble you.

Thanks.

Ecenur

[Jeremy]

Hi Ecenur,

Nice finding! Then you can add this to the top of main.js to prevent Google Translate from translating the page:

const dontTranslate = ()=>(document.body!==null&&document.body.setAttribute("translate","no"))||window.requestAnimationFrame(dontTranslate);
dontTranslate();

The errors you encountered are not related to the changes you made but to an attack on our servers over the weekend and to the crashes it led to. Things should be back to normal now, let me know if you still experience issues logging in and/or editing your projects

Jeremy

[ecenur]

Thank you so much Jeremy! I added the code you shared and it works!

I’m sorry about the attack. I didn’t know. I don’t have any problems now.

Thanks again.

Ecenur

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