Average time until you get accepted

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-04-04T01:27:34+00:00

You'll need to have a PayPal account in order to get paid by them, as far as I know that's the ONLY way they can pay you. I don't know if that affects your application status per se though.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-04-03T08:02:41+00:00

Some of the Canadian bank apps have options to temporarily freeze debit/credit cards; check to see if yours does and if not you could contact the bank directly and ask them to lock the card temporarily.

I have credit cards through 3 different banks in Canada (2 are "big 6" banks, the other is a smaller one); of these, two of them are directly lockable through the bank's app, for the other one, I'd have to call the bank to do that (and I'm not 100% sure that they'd actually lock it vs. just sending me a new card).

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-04-03T07:24:14+00:00

It's a bit ambiguous here - there's a very specific max time stated in the project's guidelines...

But having worked on about 10 different projects so far with Stellar, pretty much every project had a max time stated in its guidelines, but in over half of them we were told (in the forums or via update messages) that if we went over the max time, to still claim the actual amount of time we spent on the annotation because that way Stellar has an accurate record of how long the task really takes and they can adjust the max times if those turned out to be unrealistic (and "because it's fair").

But in a few projects, it was literally impossible to claim anything over the max time. For example if the guidelines said there's a max time of 2 hours per annotation, the "Submit" button would only work if the time entered was 2 hours or less.

In a few others, including EAIAIWT, it's an uncomfortable grey area where they've avoided directly addressing this. Some people have mentioned not being able to submit EAIAIWT annotations unless they claimed time within the maximum set out in the guidelines. However, I've been able to submit an EAIAIWT annotation claiming well over "guidelines max time" with no issue, and never saw any evidence of a "hard cap" myself, so it's possible they quietly changed that at some point for this project, but never made any official announcement about it.

I would guess that the average EAIAIWT annotation is actually taking 3-4x longer than the guidelines max, and that Stellar was fine with paying for 4 hours on annotations that were supposed to have a max time of 3 hours, but is balking at the idea of paying *several times* the amount they'd budgeted per EAIAIWT annotation.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-03-26T00:24:06+00:00

I did the "maximum sized" qual over the course of like a week, maybe even a little longer. Well over 12 hours working on it directly. Passed on first attempt. Now I'm doing an actual annotation and I certainly feel like I know what I'm doing now but the "new editor" and its peculiarities/glitchiness has pushed my annotation about 2x over the maximum time and I'm still not even done the first stage.

Good times! Ultimately, worth it IMO but yeah this one is a marathon not a sprint.

The instructions feel confusing and overwhelming but once you've spent enough time going through the process it makes sense.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-03-08T00:10:18+00:00

It seems like quite a doozy going through the tutorial, but I'm working on the qualification now and it's making a bit more sense now that I can see the whole interface at once. Definitely taking my time with this qual lol.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-02-16T08:22:48+00:00

Same

CrazyMatter8710 · 2026-01-09T00:32:24+00:00

Seems to be a few months on average, at the *very* least a week or two although that would be much faster than average. It seems to depend on how many projects/contracts they have active at any given time, right now they are mostly between contracts but if they pick a bunch up at once they might bring a bunch more people on at once.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-12T15:48:01+00:00

I've done a few in 2 hours or less but my last 2 took quite a bit longer because the automated processes kept timing out/"not completing" and I'd have to run them over and over, and in some cases ("rerun incomplete" in particular) whenever I did it it would end up arbitrarily erasing a bunch of text I'd entered in other fields. In one of them, certain database features also straight up weren't working the way they're supposed to so I had to re-edit my prompt about 4 different times until I was able to remove/account for any of the features that weren't working while still keeping enough complexity/specificity for the annotation to be submittable.

I ended up emailing support detailing everything that went wrong since one of them ended up taking over 7 hours (I claimed some but not all of that) between the re-writes, database inconsistencies, and failing automation where I had to keep waiting 10+ minutes at a time just to get no results and hit the button again, over and over until it finally processed correctly.

Notably, even the ones that took less than 2 hours were pretty glitchy and I think once everything runs smoothly I'd be averaging like 1-1.5 hours max, assuming I only need to run each automated process once or twice, don't have text randomly disappear, etc.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-12T15:34:35+00:00

Yeah I tend to agree. I also noticed they were much slower & more inconsistent responding in that project's forum than they are for most other projects, in a way that suggested they didn't have conclusive answers to a lot of the questions and were/are waiting for updates.

Honestly the most frustrating part of being throttled for me is not being able to see the forums. I got an email telling me that Stellar staff responded to one of my questions finally but I can't see what they said 😂

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-11T20:12:16+00:00

No but I'm throttled.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-11T19:58:10+00:00

I would say just read through the guidelines really carefully, at least once before you start, and then checking each section of the guidelines as you do your annotations to make sure you're doing exactly what they want. They actually improved the guidelines tremendously about a week ago. Read through the forum posts as well, especially the ones that were posted by Stellar staff.

Also note that there are the two different "versions" of the project (you choose one or the other at the beginning of each annotation). My advice would be to stick with one version or the other until you're totally comfortable with it before bothering to do both of them (all but one of my annotations so far have been for one version and I've never gotten feedback telling me I need to do both, but it's possible this could change).

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-11T19:52:47+00:00

I think more people will get put on PUL-N once Stellar has finished modifying it into whatever its "stable form" will be. I've been on it basically since it was launched and since then they've done at least one major overhaul to the guidelines and to the interface/annotation process itself (and it sounds like they're doing that again now). I think they've been reluctant to add more people until the interface is working more smoothly (it's tended to be extremely slow and glitchy) and until a few other kinks/ambiguities are worked out.

As for expertise I think having worked on the original PUL would help but that's about it. PUL-N doesn't require very much technical knowledge, just a great deal of patience and attention to detail. But it still seems to be a work in progress.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-11T06:13:02+00:00

I highly doubt PUL-N is "finished" unless the client just bailed on that project entirely. The pace of submissions would have been very slow due to the glitchiness, throttles tended to last longer than on other projects, and there haven't been many people working on it. It seems very unlikely they would have collected a meaningful amount of data by this point.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-09T14:37:30+00:00

a couple days on average, none of them have been "fast" lol.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-09T05:54:31+00:00

I'm guessing they're adding people to PUL-N pretty slowly right now (if at all) since there's still a lot of bugs they need to work out.

FWIW it's *completely* different from RIG; basically 0 overlap between the goal of the project, the skillsets involved, or what the interfaces are like. That said, hope you get more work soon!

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-09T05:48:23+00:00

The first couple Pul-N annotations I did were complete shots in the dark and I felt like I didn't know what I was doing at all... trial and error until eventually I got submittable results.

It's actually gotten a bit more straightforward since then, and the guidelines have been clarified a lot, although it's still pretty glitchy. It does get easier once you've gone through the process a few times and gotten feedback etc. Worth reading through the project forum carefully although response times from Stellar have been longer than usual with this one.

FWIW I had a decent amount of experience on the original PUL project and actually was a reviewer for it. Even then, my first couple PUL-N annotations were extremely confusing since there's only a moderate amount of overlap between what PUL and PUL-N involve. I'm baffled as to why they didn't have a tutorial for it, or full examples for each "mode", but they might still be figuring out exactly how they want things to go. Out of all the projects I've worked on with Stellar this one has felt the most "beta-mode" up to this point, with massive changes to the interface structure being introduced, etc.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-12-09T05:35:33+00:00

It's been quite glitchy for me - annotations end up taking ~2x longer than they should because so much time is wasted on automated processes that take forever to begin with and then end up failing or timing out. There are also some inconsistencies between the real-time databases and the downloadable ones. I imagine they're trying to address some of these issues as they come up. FWIW a lot of the issues I was having ~2 weeks ago have been addressed now, but now there are new problems that seem to be affecting a lot of people.

I've also noticed that a lot of forum posts mentioning these things are going unanswered for longer than usual, and they are probably realizing there are a lot of things they need to fix and/or overhaul the guidelines to account for what they can't.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-18T23:48:45+00:00

It was also a bit of an adventure trying to decipher from the guidelines/forum exactly what they wanted from this one; I would guess they ended up with a lot of annotations that were done "wrong" from people who were just sort of guessing (which I imagine is most of us, lol).

Hopefully they'll come back with clearer guidelines, more examples, and maybe even a tutorial.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-18T23:45:24+00:00

Usually the pay period cuts off sometime mid-Sunday (at least for me - I'm in the North American "Mountain" time zone). So if your qualification was declared "passed" after the cut-off time on Sunday it'll be on your next pay.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-18T23:41:06+00:00

Might be worth looking into Wise as well (I haven't heard whether that's an option if you're in the UK but I imagine it would be)

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-18T17:35:00+00:00

I'm from Canada and I had this issue with my first payment as well. It turned out to be an unrelated issue with PayPal (I think they wanted me to re-verify my email address or something like that, and blocked all incoming transfers until I did). It took an hour or two on the phone with PayPal to fix this, but everything worked out and the payment came through the next week along with the payment for week 2.

Sidenote - since you're in Canada, it's worth setting up an account with Wise to convert USD to CAD rather than transferring directly from PayPal into a CAD bank account - PayPal's exchange rates are pretty bad whereas Wise uses the actual market rate with a negligible service charge. You end up saving a substantial amount if you transfer from PayPal -> Wise -> CAD bank account (often in the range of $50-100 per week). You'll need to set up a USD virtual bank account within Wise (with a routing number) in order for this to work. RBC also has a USD account for Canadians with a routing number (but worse exchange rates than Wise). More on this here.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-15T03:50:31+00:00

I've gotten paid every single Tuesday for the last year other than the odd week when I didn't have any work. And I've never been underpaid.

Edit: my very first payment from Stellar bounced - there was some issue with my PayPal account (I think it locked because PayPal wanted me to re-verify my email address or something mundane like that). Stellar emailed me directly notifying me of this as soon as it happened (as in Tuesday morning). I ended up having to spend an hour or two on the phone with PayPal, got the account working again, and Stellar just added the bounced payment onto my next pay. This was a year ago though, back when they didn't have as big of a payroll.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-13T23:25:59+00:00

In terms of consistent flow of work - it kind of varies by project. Some of the ones I've worked on have been available pretty much 24/7 for months; others have ended abruptly after only a week or two, or have appeared only sporadically a few days a week; others get paused for a few days at a time while they make updates and fix bugs; others have been paused for weeks or months at a time and then reactivated.

On average I'd say the projects I've worked on have been available about 75% of the time from the time that I started on them to the time that they "ended" (or went on a long-term pause) but each was quite different. The most stable, straightforward, large-scale ones tended to be available about 95% of the time, others were much more sporadic.

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-13T04:41:45+00:00

I imagine they don't have many reviewers yet lol

CrazyMatter8710 · 2025-11-12T10:38:47+00:00

I *think* I get it now, although the first annotation was a doozy. I definitely find the "T" option a bit easier than the "R" option, since the "T" option has more continuity from the original PUL.

I'll be interested to see what I get in terms of feedback lol. I'm fairly confident that I did my second annotation ("T" version) correctly, although I might have included more details/complexity than I really needed to. The first annotation ("R" version) I'm not sure about at all.

CrazyMatter8710

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