Editorial > Caption Contest

Hello, some time ago my caption was entered into the Caption Contest. It had the same use of capital letters, ellipses, creativity and way to describe the settings. Everything. The credit went to someone else though, and now I see people being entered into the competition more than once per competition. Is there any kind of competition bias going on here? I can understand if it was a mistake, or if for some reason the same caption, to every detail, was thought of by another user... but it would be nice to have an answer. Thank you. ~vulpes_terminus

Honestly, we don't bother even looking at the usernames, so there is no bias. Some people just get lucky getting their captions in twice. Their jokes probably just tickled the judge's funny bone that day. As far as the mystery of your caption goes, that's really odd. The way our side of things is set up, a player's caption and their username are basically fused together and there's no way for us to mistakenly assign an entry to a different author. Did you perhaps post your caption somewhere else before submitting it to us? Someone might have copied it. There's also the bizarre chance that someone really did come up with the same caption as you. (This happens more often than most people realise, but your description sounds like it was a pretty specialised entry.) We do modify formatting sometimes so that the captions look unified. For example, you may have submitted:

Chia: And that is why I no longer eat hot dogs.

The other person could have submitted:

The Chia says, "And that's why I no longer eat hotdogs."

We saw the second one first and edited it to look more like your example since that's how we stylise all the entries.

Basically, there's not much we can tell you. If you didn't put it up somewhere else, you must have had the same idea as someone who entered before you. (Issue 321)

I have been using the site in English throughout all this time. Recently, I have seen many Italians taking part in the Italian Caption Contest number 100 in attempt to get the Caption Contest avatar. Am I allowed to switch my language to Chinese and just to take part in the Chinese Caption Contest number 100 to try for the avatar, then switch back to English, or is that against the rules? ~[username removed]

We got quite a few questions concerning this actually. We agreed no one should be punished for being bilingual, and those that can speak multiple languages are more than welcome to participate in contests in different languages. (As long as that's the ONLY language you enter for that contest. No entering today's caption in both Chinese and English!) Also, please don't take this as an open invitation to start entering the Caption Contests of languages you don't really speak. That's just rude. :P (Issue 320)