One of the best advantages of running external campaigns in Microworkers-TTV is that you can have greater deal of control over how Workers submit results for your tasks, and how they are stored.
The External Campaign
To achieve the most desired display or logic of how your Microjobs are to be shown to Workers than the provided layout in Microworkers Templates, you can create a campaign and host your questions from your own website through Microworkers-TTV External Campaign solution.
An External Template (ET) appears to the Worker as a task in Microworkers-TTV whose question form is a web browser frame (iframe). The Worker’s browser loads the contents of the iframe directly from a URL you provide when you create a campaign.
The Worker submits results for your task using the form or template on your website. Your form then submits this data back to Microworkers-TTV.
Why a Web Server
Setting up a Microjob from an External Template (ET) requires a web server capable of functioning under very high load.
This is to ensure you get good results for your assigned Microjobs. With it, you can make sure your web server and web pages can provide your Workers with quality experience. The Microworkers Page gets heavy traffic, thus your web server will need to be able to respond quickly and correctly when receiving many requests in a short period of time. You may avail such from:
1. Free blog sites and similar services that comes with free/shared hosting (for not very complicated forms)
An external campaign can be as simple as a web form in an HTML file. For such, the web server hosting the External Template containing your task does not need sophisticated server functionality. This external template was created from a free WordPress blog:
2. Own website hosted on own server (or Rent servers)
This is advisable for complex, interactive forms. For example, you run a product categorization portal where a new product is uploaded every minute. You want Workers to categorize the products (displayed in photos) according to different criteria and send them to your database in real time.
This is where you would need to have your own website hosted on dedicated server because questions on your External Template depend on your web server for rendering the question form, thus your server will need to be engineered for high availability.
Requirements for your External Template
For any of the above-approach, apart from the required fields for the answers (text – article, image uploads, image category selection answers, etc), your External Template should also have 2 hidden fields, values to which it accepts via URL query string:
campaign_id
mw_id
***An optional hidden field, TTV random key, in case of HG campaign:
rand_key
Note that Campaign ID and MW ID are always mandatory. Random Key is mandatory for HG campaigns only.
Your task (in the form of a Mirojob) will be rendered inside an iframe that has certain limitations. Remember that since Microworkers-TTV will display ET task details in iframe, you shouldn’t use “X-Frame-Options: DENY or SAMEORIGIN” value as response header on page with task details.
Note of the things to check on your blog/website when opting to use the TTV External Template feature for your campaign:
☞ With https support. Note that the URL for the External URL must use the HTTPS protocol.
☞ Will accept at least Campaign ID and Random Key (HG campaigns only) and optionally MW Id as parameters (Form page).
☞ Will redirect user back to TTV and submit some data which will be saved on TTV side (Callback page).
Setting up Your External Campaign
So to go about you external campaign:
☞ Create campaign details on your blog/website (Form Page)
☞ Start an external campaign in Microworkers TTV.
Then take the URL from the campaign details in his blog/website (step 1) and enter in your TTV ET campaign details (particularly step 3):
https://ttv.microworkers.com/newcampaign/step3/1234567890xxx_HG
https://ttv.microworkers.com/newcampaign/step3/1234567890xxx _B
So, when worker click submits a task in his page, Your web page should capture submitted answers along with the campaign id, worker id (and optionally random key if HG). As soon as data is stored on your side, your page should submit empty form to:
https://ttv.microworkers.com/dotask/submitProof/<CampaignId>/<CampaignType>.
Page should submit empty form if you didn’t specify any parameters in “Manage Parameters (Optional)” on https://ttv.microworkers.com/newcampaign/step3/<CampaignId>_<CampaignType>.
☞ Both Requirements and Process are discussed in this blogpost:
https://www.microworkers.com/blog/whats-new-in-microworkers-ttv-external-template/
Data Security
Note that in the above-approaches, you will be able to automatically store your collected answers directly to your own database/website. And with the advantage of TTV platform you do not have to worry about any of your task information being stored in Worker’s end. At the end of each task, Workers will only get a Vcode as proof for finishing a task. All the proofs are only visible only to you. This keeps your data secured and private.
You can optionally save some values on Microworkers-TTV side. These values can help you match tasks from your side with that of MW.
You can add a special field in your template (Example: “code,” “id” etc) which contain unique values, and you can use this field to match your records with TTV tasks.
To do this, on https://ttv.microworkers.com/newcampaign/step3/<CampaignId>_<CampaignType> you need to put the special field (example: “id”) in “Manage Parameters (Optional)” section.
Then you can submit hidden “id” field value to https://ttv.microworkers.com/dotask/submitProof/<CampaignId>/<CampaignType>
The Callback Page (from TTV side) will capture parameters passed from your Form Page (of E’s page), validate them, and save the required data in Microworkers database, but hidden to Workers, only displaying Success/Fail rating of Worker.
Stick to MW Guidelines
Just the same, note that tasks listed in your External Template (ET) must meet the Microworkers Guidelines in Setting up Campaigns. Microworkers reserves the right to terminate campaigns with inappropriate content or promoting tasks which are expressly prohibited in our guidelines.
Related Posts
Creating External Campaign from API
Submitting Proofs for your External Campaign
TTV External Campaign – Basics, Requirements, Process