Millisecond Forums » Millisecond Forums » Inquisit 6 » Feature request: Abort (online) study during download of data

Feature request: Abort (online) study during download of data

AKrishna — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 13:11:54 GMT

Dear all,

I just had a participant in an online study contact me in some distress after having had to wait 30 minutes to quit Inquisit due to a long download. The experiment (launch page https://mili2nd.eu/bwec) had around 500MB of files (which the participant knew), but the download took an unreasonably long time for some reason (could be local, could be short-lived server issues). Regardless, after five minutes of waiting, the participant understandably wanted to quit the experiment and tried using the quit code I had supplied at the start of the experiment. However (as best as I can tell), this was useless, as Inquisit had not yet properly started the main script file, but was still in the download phase.

I realize these are edge cases, but I wonder if a future feature update might consider allowing the user some option to cancel the experiment's start while files are being loaded? Of course, users can generally use Task Manager (on Windows) to kill the process, but less tech-savvy users are unlikely to know this and experimenters often cannot help directly in online studies. Just a thought!

RE: Feature request: Abort (online) study during download of data

Dave — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 13:11:54 GMT

+x[quote]

[b]AKrishna - 1/5/2024[/b]
Quick update: the participant reports that Task Manager did not work. It's participant 137 in this study; the logs on millisecond.com show "Unable to open file" error codes (code 16) roughly 30 minutes after the participant started the final script file.
[/quote]

Task Manager will definitely work. There's currently no other way to quit during the downloading phase (as you noted, no script is actually being executed at this point, so the task-quitting commands have no effect). You may want to consider streaming the videos at runtime rather than having Inquisit download them in full prior to launching the script.

https://www.millisecond.com/support/docs/current/html/language/attributes/stream.htm

This will reduce launch time significantly, at the cost of playback issues at runtime (i.e. if the participant's internet connection is too slow, videos might stutter).

RE: Feature request: Abort (online) study during download of data

AKrishna — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 10:39:10 GMT

Quick update: the participant reports that Task Manager did not work. It's participant 137 in this study; the logs on millisecond.com show "Unable to open file" error codes (code 16) roughly 30 minutes after the participant started the final script file.