Firstly, I understand why you’d ask this question, as yours was a great caption and you scored highly compared to others on the shortlist.
The process for choosing the prize winner is:
The day before the end of the month, I post a poll on the forum to choose the winner from the shortlist (ten top scoring captions of the month)
The poll is visible to Contributors (i.e. those who have paid into the prize fund)
The shortlisted caption with the most votes by 10pm on the last day of the month wins the prize
Reasons for this extra voting stage:
It’s possible to manipulate the main caption vote by colluding or creating fake accounts. Our mod team has measures in place to spot unfair voting, but we may not catch them all
It’s only contributors who provide the cash prize fund, so it’s fair they’re the ones to decide the winner. In the past, it was only me that picked the winner, but now there are 22 contributors who do so. Much better!
Contributors are mostly long-standing captioneers who have read thousands of captions and have a knack at spotting original humour that takes effort and creativity
Contributors may also use to the final vote to reward people who have managed to get two or more captions into the shortlist (in this case, @John_Harrison had two)
Please don’t take this to mean that your Zebra caption wasn’t original, or that there was any suspicion of unfair voting.
The process isn’t perfect, but I believe it makes sense, and we are always open to new contributors if anyone would like to take part in the final voting stage, and help fund the site so we can continue to offer cash prizes.
In fact we could really do with some more contributors, since we currently only have enough money in the pot to pay out two more prizes this year
Apologies Phil, I’m one of the contributors and would’ve given your caption a vote as it was by far my favourite of the month, but I forgot it was that time of the month so didn’t cast any votes. I think because your caption was so long ago it is possible it wasn’t as fresh in some people’s minds. Rest assured I’ll be giving it a vote in the caption that got away at the end of the year!
Hi Chris
Thanks for replying and saying you have a “Euro vision Contest minus Graham Norton” type process in place!! It makes everything a lot clearer as to what is going on now.
I will check out your contributors link later when I get home.
Once again thanks a lot for everyone’s hard work in running this site.
I’m listed as one of the contributers, but have never seen any option of being able to vote to decide the winner. How do I do this? I loved Phil’s caption and was disappointed for him when it didn’t win (the winning one was very good - but I did like Phil’s more).
There are separate groups set up for the contributors in different years (2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025). The 2025 group, which you’re in, wasn’t permissioned to access the Contributors category on the forum.
You should have access now if you refresh the page in your browser
Edit: I’ve just combined all the different year groups into a single “Contributors” group
