Double PSA: Avoid Maze / maze.design / maze.co studies until they fix their auto-reject issue, and a theory on pre-screening pay

Tagging /u/prolific-support for visibility - this is affecting a ton of participants and bringing human intervention into an automatic process. It's also steering people away from Maze studies, which affects their participant pool and data.

Some history: Maze was the first researcher to offer in-study screening on Prolific, and has a deep integration with the platform. Their studies almost all have something like [RECORDING + SCREENING REQUIRED] in the study name. If you got screened out, they would pay the fee in the form of a bonus, and request a return. This was done without human intervention - you would immediately get an automated message upon screening out, and it worked pretty well.

Last year, Prolific implemented its own in-study screening. This works somewhat similar to the original Maze version, except the researcher decides who gets screened out, the payment is marked differently, and the user no longer has to return the study. It takes a little longer and is imperfect, but it opens screen-outs to many more researchers.

HOWEVER (1): Maze has not updated their systems to account for this, and are automatically rejecting anyone who gets screened out. Responding to the rejection does eventually get an answer saying that Prolific needs to overturn the rejection, which a) takes a long time, and b) affects our approval rate in the meantime. And what's worse, if we don't respond to the automated message, the rejection likely sticks.

HOWEVER (2): It seems that researchers cannot pay a flat screen-out fee, but have to compensate participants based on the time it took. So if it takes a minute, the researcher pays $0.14 / £0.10, but if we take longer, they owe us more. Many researchers - Maze included - have started rejecting, claiming that people are taking too long to get screened out. "Took too long" is not a valid reason to reject a study, so one possible explanation is that they don't want to pay more for a quick screen-out if people take longer.

So I'm hoping to get two answers from Prolific on this:

1) Are there any plans in the works to fix the Maze auto-reject issue?

2) Is this indeed how the screen-out pay works now?