Blocking workers

When you identify workers that are not putting in the requested effort on your tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mechanical Turk), you have the option to block them. This prevents them from doing any future work for you so long as the block is in place. Workers are notified that they've been blocked from your tasks.

The CreateWorkerBlock operation can be used to block a worker by simply providing the ID of the worker and a reason for the block. Similarly, you can remove a block by using the DeleteWorkerBlock operation. At any point you can retrieve all of the workers that have been blocked by using the ListWorkerBlocks operation.

Note that we recommend you be judicious in your use of worker blocks and only block those workers that are clearly not making an attempt to correctly respond to your task (spamming). If a worker is simply misreading instructions or lacks the requisite skills to complete your task successfully, we advise you to use a custom qualification requirement to exclude them from future tasks, rather than a block. Because the blocks a worker receives are a component of Mechanical Turk worker review policies and frequent blocks may result in account suspension, workers are sensitive to being blocked by requesters. If the worker community believes that you are blocking workers unfairly, they may choose to avoid accepting your tasks in the future.