  Online participant recruitment platforms such as Prolific have been gaining
popularity in research, as they enable researchers to easily access large pools
of participants. However, participant quality can be an issue; participants may
give incorrect information to gain access to more studies, adding unwanted
noise to results. This paper details our experience recruiting participants
from Prolific for a user study requiring programming skills in Node.js, with
the aim of helping other researchers conduct similar studies. We explore a
method of recruiting programmer participants using prescreening validation,
attention checks and a series of programming knowledge questions. We received
680 responses, and determined that 55 met the criteria to be invited to our
user study. We ultimately conducted user study sessions via video calls with 10
participants. We conclude this paper with a series of recommendations for
researchers.
