Troubleshooting

[monicado]

Hi Jeremy, thank you so much for continuing to look into this. I had a lightbulb moment and managed to figure it out. It turns out the problem was with those three particular video files that I had initially changed. Those videos that I put in had an mp4 extension but didn’t have the right codecs or something because were taken out of Elan. I think this prevented them from being run in pcibex. After I realized this, I uploaded yet another version of those problem videos which I think had been edited using a different program and so had been exported as an mp4 file that was compatible with PCIBEX. It worked immediately and now I have no preload issues. I have tested it with someone else who was also able to preload quickly. You may also now be working with the correct mp4 videos.

I think I was lucky because someone else who tried to preload videos had mentioned these issues also and fixed it by converting their mp4 to an mp4 using some conversion software and it also resolved their problem. They were also working with videos originally obtained from Elan, so it might be specific to the exports from that program.

I can send more information about the files if you think that would be helpful to you/others working with video files in the future.

[Jeremy]

Thank you for the detailed feedback, Monica, it will be greatly helpful to users who face the same issue in the future!

I will look into the particularities of video files obtained from Elan

Jeremy

[daiwen]

Hi Jeremy,

I have a problem concerning preloading pictures. Sometimes, when I used the data-collection link to run a pilot test, a “please wait while the resources are preloading” page might “randomly” come out, and then the picture I expected was a blank. I called it “randomly” because without changing anything (the script or resources), by simply refreshing the page, everything can run through smoothly (no preloarding page anymore and the pictures were presented as designed). I am wondering if there is anything wrong with my test or anything I can do to avoid this “random” problem. Please understand that it is not so convenient to share the experiment link. Sorry.

Another problem is about refreshing the experiment. It seems that too many requests may lead to the block of some new requests and a warning sign saying “ERROR: There must be some items in the running order!” might be presented when there are obviously some items. I am not sure if there are other ways to deal with the “block” other than just waiting.

Look forward to your reply, and many thanks in advance!

Daiwen

[Jeremy]

Hi Daiwen,

Please feel free to send the experiment link to support@pcibex.net if you feel more comfortable sharing it privately

The random blank image issue might have difference sources. One is, you might have different groups in your CSV file and only some rows have invalid references, resulting in the error showing only when you run the experiment in that group—if you have an early SetCounter command, simply refreshing the page could be enough to switch group. Another explanation would be that the server hosting the images refuses to serve some of them in certain conditions (eg. repeated requests over a short time window)

The error message “ERROR: There must be some items in the running order!” appears when there is a syntax error in your script that prevents it from creating the items variable (or when you simply don’t create any items, but you said that’s not your case). Simply refreshing a functional experiment should not make the error message appear, unless you edit the script in the meantime to introduce syntax errors. One explanation I could imagine is the farm maintains multiple parallel copies of your script and randomly serves one that does contain a syntax error. Maybe try to save a backup of your script (that you know to be functional), delete the script file from your project and recreate it using the backup, and see whether the problem persists

Jeremy

[ediachek]

Hi Jeremy,

I am using an Amazon S3 server to host my materials for the study. However, because there are so many items for each list, it takes a really long time to preload them all, so I was thinking that it would be helpful to set up a conditional statement that will grab list number and will only preload the materials for that list. Can you please advise on how to make that possible?

So far, I have this:

getVar("group").test.is(1)
.success(PreloadZip("https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/bell.bottoms.pcibex/bell_bottoms_list1.zip"))

But I also have 16 lists and was hoping to make it more efficient! Thank you for your help.

Here is the link to my study: https://farm.pcibex.net/r/IFjZFn/

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by ediachek.

[Jeremy]

Hi,

See this message (don’t mind the warning in bold, it doesn’t concern you since you’re running the experiment on farm.pcibex.net)

Jeremy

[ediachek]

This is incredible! Thank you so much!

[ediachek]

Hi Jeremy,

I am experiencing an odd issue! I am loading my images for the study from Amazon using a .zip file. The files load well except for the images with the number “3” in the filename (e.g., 84.3.jpg or 12.3.jpg). I changed the filenames to include “three” instead of “3”, i.e., 84.three.jpg but that didn’t work. Do you know what might be the issue?

Here is the link to my project: https://farm.pcibex.net/r/IFjZFn/

Best,
Yev

[Jeremy]

Hi Yev,

All the “three”/”3” filenames referenced in your CSV table end with .jgp instead of .jpg

Jeremy

[ediachek]

This is embarrassing! Thanks so much!

[ediachek]

Hi Jeremy,

I am ready to run my experiment (yay) and I want to be able to get participants’ Prolific ID from the URL, so I followed the instructions from here: https://doc.pcibex.net/how-to-guides/using-prolific/. I copied and pasted your code (see below) but it gives me an error:

//Validation
newTrial("final" ,
     newText("<p>Thank you for your participation!</p>")
            .center()
           .print()
    ,
    
    newText("<p><a href='https://app.prolific.co/submissions/complete?cc=CGL9GN20'+ GetURLParameter("id")+"' target='_blank'>Click here to confirm your participation on Prolific.</a></p> <p>This is a necessary step in order for you to receive participation credit!</p>")
        .center()
        .print()
    ,
    
    newButton("void")
    .wait()
    )

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix this? Here is also the link to the experiment: https://farm.pcibex.net/r/LAfkkh/

[Jeremy]

Hi,

There is a typo in that code (that I apparently failed to fix): it should be newText("<p><a href='https://app.prolific.co/submissions/complete?cc=CGL9GN20'"+ GetURLParameter("id")+"' target='_blank'>Click here to confirm your participation on Prolific.</a></p> <p>This is a necessary step in order for you to receive participation credit!</p>") (ie. there should be a " after ', before + GetURLParameter)

Jeremy

[ediachek]

Thank you for that! It worked!

A quick follow-up on it — for some reason, in my collected datafile, participants’ prolific ids are recorded as “PROLIFIC ID” instead of their actual ids. Is there a way to fix that?

[Jeremy]

Did you include ?id={{%PROLIFIC_PID%}} at the end of the URL, as described in step 3?

Jeremy

[ediachek]

I didn’t initially but then I did, ran an additional participant, and it didn’t work again… Here is the link to the study: https://farm.pcibex.net/r/LAfkkh/

[Author]

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