Photo upvoting now available to more captioneers

Photos
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Please help us choose the next photos for the competition here: https://www.caption.me/pendingphotos

We reserve photo voting to our more established captioneers, but today this now open to more captioneers.

Prior to today, only captioneers with a votes per caption ratio of 1+ were able to upvote photos (293 captioneers). The requirement has now been relaxed to 0.5+ (514 captioneers)

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Thanks for the upcoming photo gallery, & especially the voting for choice of pics.

Don’t you hate it when you’ve formulated the perfect caption for the upcoming photo, you’re counting down the minutes. Then, in the last hour, some nit… I mean wonderfully creative soul, votes on a different photo & the one you were prepared for gets bumped!

Scrolling down in the gallery, I see there are photos with more votes than the ones we’re using, yet they never surface. What’s up with that?

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Could it be due to downvotes on the photos?


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Hmm… didn’t think of that… let me check…

Ok, I don’t think so. There is a pic there of a costumed guy at Comic Con, it has 9 up votes & 4 down, which leaves 5. Yet, the pic approved for the most recent contest, I think got in with just 4, possibly 5.

A few times I’ve seen that Comic Con pic up in the top row, then move back down the list despite its number of votes.

Actually, the photo I was hoping for, was the stork & elephant one, but I’m just trying to learn how everything works here.

thanks Chris

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Ah I see how the site might be confusing. 


The rank of a photo is determined by the following formula:

(votes up - votes down) divided by the square root of (votes up + votes down)

Basically I needed a way to order fairly, taking into account the overall number of votes. If I just used votes up - votes down, then the following two photos would rank equally, and that would be wrong IMO:

5 upvotes, 4 downvote
1 upvote, zero downvote

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I was told there wouldn’t be any math… is this going to be on the final?

thanks Chris

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I personally think that a “surprise” photo would be better with no sneak previews. In fact I actually thought they were for first few weeks and never noticed the gallery at all! But then I got to thinking, “gosh, these guys have lightening responses” after only a few millisecond of seeing this image…ha, the penny eventually dropped. Bear in mind, I still haven’t sussed out how to upload a profile pic from my phone and that kind of sums me up. Haha. 

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Chris, I do get a bit puzzled about the downvotes.  I thought that the facility had been withdrawn years ago, and yet I have seen some definitely recent photos which did have downvotes.  How does that happpen?

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I will check when I’m next at my PC but from memory I think downvoting is available to some long-established captioneers. 


I would make it more generally available but unfortunately I found it was abused by a minority who were voting peculiarly. 

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That’s funny Ellen, I did exactly the same thing. For the first couple of weeks I was thinking, my God, these people are not only creative geniuses but they can type at 300 words per minute!

I’m with you on the surprise photo too. Often there’s a bleedingly obvious theme that spawns multiple similar captions. I’d love to see the quickest wit rewarded, rather than the quickest connection speed. And maybe it’s just me, but whenever I cut and paste, it feels like cheating.

That said, the vote based photo selection process works well, and vote visibility is a necessary part of a photo’s promotion/demotion. I suppose photos could just be displayed in descending chronological order without the votes being visible, but people would need to regularly view, and vote for, the fresh offerings.

On that note, a shout out to the regular photo contributors, without whom we’d have nothing to caption.

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Smiles. I am glad it didn’t just happen to me. I agree that the photographers should somehow be showcased, credit to and encouragement for creativity is important across the board. I often click on the name and look at their other work when they appear in the current caption.

My daughter enjoys photography so am used to looking at it.

I initially voted for this or that picture but eventually gave up as none of it made any sense but I am a “less is more” type and was blinded by the complication of it all. No criticism intended towards Mr.Beach who invests a lot of time into the site I am sure and has probably accepted that you can’t please all the people…

It’s just a shame that the element of surprise, anticipation and resulting spontaneous creative response is thwarted by predictable photos.But that’s the way it is.

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Thanks for your response and on a positive note, it’s great we have somewhere to meet and share and flex our creative muscles in such challenging times.