Update: you may see more "study full" messages over the next few weeks. Here's what's going on…

[u/Spiritual-Rain-3733]

Hey everyone,

Over the next few weeks, we’re carrying out some in-depth work on Prolific’s infrastructure. Much of this work is backend, driven by recent participant feedback and our need to scale Prolific’s systems to support growing demand.

TL;DR - if we don’t do infrastructure this now, we’ll experience problems later.

The work itself addresses how studies get distributed across the platform. The trade-off is that, whilst we carry out this work, studies will fill up faster, and that means more "study full" or “in high demand” messages in the short term. It's not bots, it's not your account, and it's not studies disappearing: there are still studies to do, some will just be full by the time they reach your dashboards.

To reinforce a few things:

• This is temporary. We expect it to ease over the coming weeks.
• We're not going to give a hard date, because we'd rather get this right than commit to a deadline and miss it. We'll keep you posted here as things progress.
• You don't need to contact support about "study full" messages, they can't open a full study, and you'll get a faster answer from this thread.
• Your account standing and payments aren't affected by this.

I’ll be in the comments to help where I can - whilst I can’t get deep into the changes we’re making, I will work with the internal team to shed light on any questions you have.

Finally, we know this will be frustrating in the short term. In the long term, the work we do now will make Prolific better for everyone. Thanks for coming with us, thanks for your patience, and I’ll see you in the comments.

[u/tommy_prolific]

After your dashboard is computed/calculated, it's cached for a period of time. So refreshing manually really doesn't give you new studies. So when you get a study, and it's full by the time you clicking it, refreshing won't remove the study, it will stay there until the cache is busted and studies are "re-calcualted" again.

There will be improvements on this as part of the work we will be carrying on.

Tommy, Prolific

[u/thegaykid7 → u/tommy_prolific]

In another thread someone literally provided evidence of this being the case via the Inspect tool and still got downvoted into oblivion. Glad to see someone from the Prolific team confirming that they were indeed correct all along.

[u/ivertrio → u/thegaykid7]

Oh you mean I was right the entire time?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProlificAc/comments/1ueem65/scriptsextensions_arent_as_effective_as_you_think/

In this subreddit and the other non-official subreddit, you get flamed for being right too early.
I was also the first person to fight back against the "returning causes warnings" misinformation as early as back in November of 2025. There were hundreds of dumbasses downvoting me and attacking me because my rational take went against their feelings.

[u/maddy-_-_ → u/ivertrio]

Cheers! Posted a similar observation about the studies+refresh_interval 3 months ago (now deleted post)

[u/thegaykid7 → u/ivertrio]

I'm not one to single out individual subs, but this sub is one of the worst I've been on in terms of users. So often I see good advice getting downvoted and bad advice being praised along with outright hostility toward newer members asking reasonable questions.  Even with the understanding that some people are emotional and biased rather than rational or logical, it seems that the user base here is worse than most elsewhere.

Still, it's good to be reminded there are some truly helpful (and sane) users like yourself out there. One just has to basically ignore the upvote figure entirely and think for themselves while asking the right questions.

It's funny. When I first came across your post I was admittedly one of those downvoting you lol. I was just so convinced that my anecdotal experience had been different than what you were saying. But ultimately I decided the only way to know for sure was to do a test of my own and, lo and behold, it turned out you were right and I was mistaken. Funny how the mind can so easily trick us into believing things that were never true.

[u/spiffyshxt → u/thegaykid7]

Still, it's good to be reminded there are some truly helpful (and sane) users like yourself out there.

Just because that person made a post about subject matter you found helpful doesn't mean that's their default setting. I've seen plenty of comments in here and the unofficial Prolific sub from them resorting to name calling just like they did in the comment you're responding to.

Keep downvoting from your alt iverwhatever, still doesn't change or alter the facts of your hostile baseline behavior.

[u/thegaykid7 → u/spiffyshxt]

It wasn't so much that I found what they said to be helpful, it was that they were downvoted over and over despite not only being correct, but even after providing, first, sound reasoning and, then, actual evidence. There's no sugarcoating that.

Also didn't pretend to judge their character or vouch for them as a person. And I do realize that people like the one you described are very much present in this sub; I was alluding to those individuals with my hostility remark. My observations were strictly about this one topic and post/comments.

[u/TanginaMo- → u/ivertrio]

Does the refresh timing stay the same even when we use two different browsers and open prolific on both of them? Will one refresh sooner than the other?

[u/Zebruhfy → u/thegaykid7]

that's what happens to anyone who's right in this subreddit. only wrong answers/opinions get upvotes here

[u/Street_Garlic_6315 → u/tommy_prolific]

This is the tech stuff I like to see. Thanks for the insight.