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.
The Winners, and VOTING!
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:
1 Galleon rating)
The caption may be funny enough to have placed among the finalists, but
compared with the other finalists this caption may fall short of impressing
you.
2 Galleon rating)
This caption might be a step up from other captions of the same image yet
still not possess the right mix of wording to tickle your tummy in the sort of
way you expect or hope to be tickled.
3 Galleon rating)
Overall? this is a GOOD caption. You can accept it as a winner of the contest
and have no general problems enjoying it.
4 Galleon rating)
Save for the captions that make you chuckle, the ones you like which are
particularly to your liking.
5 Galleon rating)
Reserve it for the HILARIOUS, the BUST-OUT-LOUD captions that you cannot
believe other people thought of or which make you roll around on the floor as
if cursed with jelly-legs. These five-Galleon rated captions are the crème de
la crème, and are subsequently eligible as representatives or the 'best
captions of' the week!
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.
The New Archive:
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!
Rapid Vote:
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!
Top Ten:
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!
The Search Feature and Conclusion:
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!
Additional Notes:
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!
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