MuggleNet | Crazy Caption Contest

A Brief Introduction:

Hello, and welcome! This tutorial will induct all new and recurring users into using and embracing each of the perks that have been included in the brand new version of MuggleNet's classic Crazy Caption Contest, which has been running successfully now for five years, since late October, 2002!

The Caption Contest is MuggleNet's best source for weekly entertainment and quite an all-around hub for user interactivity. Each week, generally on Sundays (Eastern/Central American Standard Time) an image is posted on the Caption Contest's main page which is usually a screen capture or promo picture from one of the five current Harry Potter movies in existence. The GOAL of the users if they wish to participate is to come up with a caption for the image on their own - using a bit of creativity, to induce humour into their captions and to give a voice to one or many of the characters depicted in the image which hopefully tends to be rather insightful and/or enjoyable! Simply put, users submit their funny captions into the contest and each week about 30 winners are chosen! It is absolutely not mandatory that you enter the Contest should you choose to read the winners. Each week with every new image, the previous week's caption finalists are posted! The Caption Contest can be viewed and only viewed at your leisure should you choose to simply sit back and watch the humour happen. You are not obligated to enter your own caption but there is certainly no harm in trying! Also, the PRIZE for winning is NON-material. Your name is credited with your caption and it is the happiness and pride of being associated with the popular contest which is rewarding for most and which has been offered sufficiently in the past.

Entering the Caption Contest:

At the top of the CC Main Page beneath the current news ticker scrolling marquee is a 'navigation bar' of sorts which will be referenced soon in this tutorial. It features all of CCv2.0's new and/or revamped subsections and all the features of the Caption Contest for easy access. Directly under these buttons will be image for the Caption Contest's current week. Once you've had a look at it (and you can click what is actually the thumbnail for an image to view it in a larger and sometimes un-cropped size!) you might want to proceed by clicking the button below the image which says 'Submit Your Entry!' This will take you to the CC Entry Form.

The entry form is a handy tool which is used for submitting all entries to the Caption Contest and which now keeps accurate track of how many entries have been sent in per week! It ensures as well that you haven't forgotten to enter your name for a caption when you try to submit and most certainly that you've entered anything at all. A FUN new feature to this entry form is the public ability to include bold, italic and underlined text in captions - and the ability to preview your entry(ies) before sending them in! Italicizing your font and the like could always be done in the past, but only via entering the plain html code into the box for submission. The Caption Contest uses italics quite frequently to depict thought amongst characters as well as non-spoken actions and similar things, and therefore it seemed fitting to let the users more easily add this formatting to their entries!

Please note, of course, that all entries are screened before chosen and that in certain cases where emphasis is placed on words etc by you the entrant, the final format of the caption is not guaranteed to be the EXACT same as you entered. The CC has a general set of grammar rules and coding preferences that can only really be picked up by reading each week's entries and all captions must conform in the end - but this should not restrict any entries from containing what you think matters. We don't 'change' your caption to make it funny or different, but we do reserve the right to omit or delude what may be viewed as offensive content or simple error and the like.

Above the entry box again is the current week's image. This is for easy viewing when you're trying to come up with an entry for the contest. Once you are ready to submit an entry (you can enter as many times per week as you like, but NOT with the same exact caption as that will not increase your chances of winning - we DO receive your entry the first time and every subsequent time you send it) click 'Submit' and you will receive a message confirming your entry. What is most important if you wish to enter is that you have fun racking your brain for ideas and that you enjoy taking part in the community.

Back on the main page of the contest at the bottom of the page beneath the button for the Entry Form, is a second image - this is the previous week's caption picture! Scrolling down, you should see the Next, Previous, and Vote buttons of the Caption Scroller. If you're a veteran Caption-Goer you will notice two things: one, that there is a button that says 'Vote'; two, that the 'Full List' feature which would normally appear in the message box before clicking the 'Next' or 'Previous' buttons is gone. That is because the old feature has been changed and made into the format for voting!

In addition to reading each week's winners, USERS can now CHOOSE to give each winning caption a rating of 1-5 'Galleons,' which will help increase that caption's standings in both the week it is written for and for all time! Voting/rating each caption is simple and rather straightforward - clicking from left to right once on the 'white' hollow coins beneath each caption listed in the box that pops up (after clicking 'Vote') in a significant manner so as to accurately represent your own personal feelings on how funny you find each winner to be! So in addition to making it through the screening and judging process of the contest's management, all users' captions are now additionally up for voting by a visitor's own fellows!

Important: in order for the other features of the Caption Contest v2.0 to work properly and for all judging to be truly representative, we ask that you grant winning captions with a five-star (or five-Galleon) rating VERY carefully! The following rating system may be adopted to apply:

The rating advisories are not meant to give you a headache - and you don't have to 'follow them' as such as it is simply advisable to use the fifth Galleon rating sparingly, generally on four, maybe five captions out of thirty. This isn't to say that you should count or keep track, either. If there are a LOT of laugh-out-loud captions you find humorous, by all means five star them all! Your particular truthful opinion and sense of humor is what will make voting work! But keep it in mind the sparing aspect and you will go quite far regardless. We don't change your votes, all votes will be processed and specific to you! In order to see current standings, there is a small bar beneath each caption which also appears in the scroller. In Mozilla Firefox, this 'bar' of current standings when viewed in a webpage will match your current MuggleNet layout and otherwise will be blue. The point is that you'll simply need to refresh the voting box whenever you'd like to see the voting status update.

One feature which the management is quite proud of is the revamped Version 2 of the Caption Contest Archive. In v2.0, all captions were entered into an actual database, linking them quite nicely to their respective images and providing nearly all of the new features which users will enjoy. Likewise, the CC Archive has never been more fun or easy to browse. Clicking the two drop-down lists for Year and Month of the Caption Contest will display beneath the 'CC Changer' each week that took place where there was a contest. Generally speaking once again, there are very nearly 250 separate weeks that have occurred already in the Caption Contest, and you can view the winners of each and every one of them!

Not only that, but you can VOTE on every caption for the past five years, using the archive to find a picture you are interested in or another method to cast your ballot and rate the best!

If you grow weary after a few weeks of peddling through the archives and wish to vote on captions using an alternative method, you can use our wonderful Rapid Vote feature! This amazing gizmo will pull any caption you haven't already voted on in a random fashion, and show you both the caption and its image so that you can judge them for yourself, in a random order! Doing so will show you many pictures and weeks of the past which you otherwise might never see or go looking for! Our wishes are of course that you DO vote on previous weeks captions in your spare time, but even so this is a neat tool which can help boost results!

This section is where it all is going. Everyone's saving the five-Galleon rating on a massive enough scale will present to the audience and new viewers at any given time the TOP TEN most well-rated captions, from any week ever! You can vote on them here if one of the ten captions (in your opinion) deserves a pushup, and otherwise it's a good segment to come to if you want a guaranteed publicly acclaimed list of ten captions from as many as ten different weeks! Surely a thrill to your humour-seeking needs!

And last but not least, there is the search feature! Again, a creation resulting from the new and amazing way to database our captions, you may find a particular one (or a particular hundred-and-sixty if you are vague and intentionally nondescript enough) very easily by putting in a search term! There is a dropdown list for searching the captions themselves or their Authors - and this is a handy specification if you'd like to, for instance, find captions that were by someone you know named Harry - or Ron, or any character name. Because those characters undoubtedly appear in our captions, it would be very difficult to locate your friend Harry's winning caption from two years ago if you had just searched for 'Harry' in general. BECAUSE you will have clicked 'authors,' however, it is now looking only for those captions with the name Harry attributed to them as being the author of that caption! Therefore, instead of 4,000 captions returned, you will have only but a handful! The Search feature has many other uses, of course, and that is only one of them. But all of these tools are at your fingertips, and we hope that you do indeed have a wonderful and more fun time than ever while browsing and visiting MuggleNet.com's Caption Contest!

This beautiful Version 2.0 of the Caption Contest was orchestrated by Eric of MuggleNet staff, who has been in charge of the Caption Contest since its third week ever running. Nearly all 7,000 winners have been screened through him and he has put tons of time into running this brilliant and popular section of MuggleNet for all five years. Developing and coding ALL super-cool features of the new Caption Contest was Michael Writhe (writhem.com), who with Eric has produced compelling and completely outstanding features to be enjoyed at no cost to the Harry Potter fans who visit this website and section. Michael is the newest member of MuggleNet Staff, whose work and dedication to this and other projects in the past three months of our struggle has been uncanny and so very darn incredible that we ~~cannot~~ thank him enough. Without him, there would be no Version 2.0 and instead, simply a few dreams and ideas that are delayed even further from coming to fruition. Thanks to you, mate, the dreams are real! The release of Version 2 is as much a testament to friendship and trials of difficulty and rewarding work as it would be anything else[striken by michael]! We are very grateful to the contributions of the handy helpful and highly enthusiastic, and additionally to all Caption Goers who completed the Caption Contest Survey a few weeks back, which did help indeed to fuel our progress on this section and have it ready in time for the CC's five year anniversary.

That said, enjoy captioning! Things are slightly different but in a more sleek, incredible way that should prove to be easier for both of us. If you still have any queries regarding the contest you may email them to mugglenetcombox@yahoo.com, for sure, and we will respond as quickly as we can. For further information on caption technique and general stuff, you may still of course visit the now-outdated but still sometimes helpful OLD About Page. Cheers!

Return to the Caption Contest Main Page

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