I created a new profile in Firefox and as a result went through what be what a new Turker might experience with no existing database.
I added the Greasemonkey extension and MK.II. No Turkmaster or Hit Scraper, or any of the other scripts I've collected over the months. So it was a very minimal environment.
It gave me a message about Merge Complete, but then the waving purple line started up and appeared to be running to infinity. I let it a run a long time as at first I thought it might be merging 45 days of HITS. A new Turker might not even understand the 45 days, or how long it "should" take to update 45 days of HITS. I eventually decided it wasn't actually doing anything.
I refreshed the tab, and it gave no error message.
I hit Update Database. It appeared to doing expected things with dates being noted as updating. Some message about too many server requests flashed and then it appeared to stop with this msg: Processing 2015-09-27 page 1 [ 757/535 ]
I don't know exactly how to interpret that, but it did appear to be incomplete.
I then did Update Database one more time, and it did some more dates (I assume they were different ... I don't really know) and this time it ran to apparent completion.
I suggest that if I had in fact been a new Turker and hadn't had prior experience with this script, I would have been confused several times, and might well have asked somebody for help, or given up for a while.
New Turker Experience (on FIrefox)
I created a new profile in Firefox and as a result went through what be what a new Turker might experience with no existing database.
I added the Greasemonkey extension and MK.II. No Turkmaster or Hit Scraper, or any of the other scripts I've collected over the months. So it was a very minimal environment.
It gave me a message about Merge Complete, but then the waving purple line started up and appeared to be running to infinity. I let it a run a long time as at first I thought it might be merging 45 days of HITS. A new Turker might not even understand the 45 days, or how long it "should" take to update 45 days of HITS. I eventually decided it wasn't actually doing anything.
I refreshed the tab, and it gave no error message.
I hit Update Database. It appeared to doing expected things with dates being noted as updating.
Some message about too many server requests flashed and then it appeared to stop with this msg:
Processing 2015-09-27 page 1 [ 757/535 ]
I don't know exactly how to interpret that, but it did appear to be incomplete.
I then did Update Database one more time, and it did some more dates (I assume they were different ... I don't really know) and this time it ran to apparent completion.
I suggest that if I had in fact been a new Turker and hadn't had prior experience with this script, I would have been confused several times, and might well have asked somebody for help, or given up for a while.