The Dave Awards [2023]

Cash Prizes
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Good morning Captioneers.

Dig out your best shoes, dust off your finest eveningwear, slap on a bit of Brut or perfume, and head for the red carpet. Oh yes, ‘The Daves’… are coming!

The idea of The Daves is to award achievements and contributions that have been made over the course of the full year and will consist of the following 5 categories.

Caption of the year award (with the shortlist comprised of monthly winners) vote open to everyone.

Finder of the year award (based on data)*

LOL award (most LOL supervotes received based on data)*

Creative award (most Creative supervotes received based on data)*

Clever award (most Clever supervotes received based on data)*

*Only Chris will have access to this annual data, therefore he alone will announce the winners alongside the Caption of the year award.

I intended to fund this myself at £20 per prize, but our very generous founding father, Chris, has offered to double the pot so it’s now £40 per prize. (Obviously everybody is welcome to donate if they’d like to)

So, it’s a bit of fun, bit of silliness, very unique to our site and it’s £200 worth of extra prizes right before Christmas, but most importantly it adds a new dynamic and recognises different areas of contribution and achievement (in addition to our monthly prizes).

Please feel free to discuss, ask questions, or make suggestions.

Happy captioning everyone.

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Dave Awards Trophy
Designing the Dave Awards 2024
Prize Fund Contributions 2023 [£1035]
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I’m stoked that @The_Wolf is taking these ideas to fruition and bringing some caption.me fun to the Christmas season.

The open vote for Caption of the Year will bring a lot of engagement to the forum, and the supervote-based awards are a great idea as they’re driven by the data and will reward the cleverest, funniest and most creative captioneers.

Not only has he come up with a brilliant concept, but he’s also made a very generous cash donation to the prize fund. Thank you @The_Wolf :pray:

Cannot wait for December! :santa:

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Outstanding. Great idea Wolf, and very generous of you and Chris.

One thought. Instead of 5 prizes at £40, what are your thoughts on 8 at £25? A few reasons for the suggestion:

  1. The Caption of the Year category will have already won a cash prize, and any of the 3 Supervote categories could potentially have too.

  2. I think the £25 fits better as a fun ‘bonus’ prize.

  3. It would be good to spread the love :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:.

Perhaps we could add another 3 categories? Here’s a few ideas off the top of my head:

Best Picture (from data: Highest voted pic for the year)

Most Winning Pictures (from data: To the photo contributor who has provided the pics behind the most monthly caption winners)

Best Newbie Caption (user selected from shortlist: 10 best scoring captions written by members who joined caption.me in 2023)

The One that got Away (user selected from shortlist: 10 best scoring non-prize winning captions)

Personal Faves (user selected from shortlist: User submitted entries of their favourite non-prize winning caption of their own)

Best Quality (from data: User with the best votes received to captions written ratio for 2023)

I think a category to recognise photo contributors would be a particularly good addition as they do a lot of work behind the scenes, as it were. Anyhoo, just a thought.

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Thanks @James_Lennox. Love the “Best Quality” and “The One that Got Away” ideas in particular! :+1:

My 2 cents:

  • I like the idea of rewarding photo submitters as well as caption writers. The downside of awarding two different photo prizes is that it divides the cash awards. My preference would be for one photo prize rather than two

  • I like the “personal faves” idea in principle, but it would be hard to administer in practice. It would take time to build the shortlist, and it might get really big. Having four different votes (“Caption of the Year,” “Best Newbie Caption,” “One That Got Away” and “Personal Faves”) would be too much voting IMO.

  • I’d like to maximise rather than dilute the cash prizes here. Big cash prizes create excitement both on and off the site (large prizes are much more marketable)

Keen to hear what @The_Wolf and others think about these suggestions? I think @The_Wolf should have final say in the design of the awards this year, as he came up with the idea and is putting his money on the line.

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Thanks, Chris. Absolutely agree, only one of the 2 photo prize options, if any.

Also agree, too much voting might get messy.

I also think I may have made an error in interpretation of the Supervote categories. Upon re-reading I now think they are for any one user’s total accumulated Supervotes over the year, rather than any one caption’s Supervotes (not sure why I thought that to start with). In this case another possible category might be:

Best Supervote Ratio (from data: User with the most Supervotes per captions written)

This category would benefit those who may produce some really good captions, but don’t/can’t caption as often.

Re the prize pool, I’d personally still rather see it spread around, but, obviously, I’m more than happy to go with whatever you and Wolf prefer, and thank-you both again for the generous contribution.

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Great suggestions James and Chris.

Maybe 7 awards at £30 a go? (I’ll stick in the extra tenner but no more category suggestions as my wife’s Christmas stocking is getting smaller by the minute) :rofl:

Because the concept of these awards is based on ‘annual contribution and achievement’, I think adding some award for photo contribution is a great idea. I don’t get involved with any photos but the site would be lost without it (same as the finders) so absolutely bang on the money with this.

‘The one that got away’ I’m also up for. We’ve had this before as a bonus and it’s another one that could be voted in forum.

Best quality is good but we all know Al would win it so I’ll just send him a Dairy Milk selection box. :wink:

Recognising achievements by newcomers is very important but maybe that could be in the form of unlocking features as discussed in the other thread. Ultimately, we want to encourage longevity and these captioneers will be up for the same awards as everyone else through participation.

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Wise words, Wolf. One point. In the absence of a minimum number of captions, Al wouldn’t take the Best Quality prize as most of us would suspect. So far in 2023, Mr. Toad has posted 47 captions for 339 votes, and a whopping 7.2 ratio!

Your point remains the same, though. While it would be good to have some sort of ratio, quality only, based prize (since the Most Supervotes categories will be determined by both quality and volume), it would be better to have something where there was some mystery behind the winner.

It was for the same reason I didn’t suggest a Most Photo Votes for the pic-based prize, as Chris would smash the opposition there :wink:

Thinking about this category further, there’s probably no point in having a Best (Most Votes) Picture prize either, since the number of votes required for photo selection is minimal and really comes down to luck more than anything. The Most Winning Pictures could maybe still be an option.

But definitely, yes, if you were to add any categories, I think The One that Got Away should be the first.

Happy to leave it in your capable hands, mate. The Daves is your baby, so however you want to structure things is great with me :+1:

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Good point James.

Yeah ‘The one that got away’ is definitely in. So that’s 6 set in stone. We’ll do 7 at £30 if Chris is happy with that.

Since your suggestions I’m very eager now to have some award for photo contribution, as it’s obviously incredibly important to what we do, and often overlooked by people like me who just rock up and take it for granted.

Not sure as yet as best way to determine the winner, simply because apart from occasionally voting for them, I don’t get involved in photos and never have. So I’ll get thinking but very much open to suggestions on how this is awarded. Maybe again, data driven, based over the year on number of photos and upvote ratio? Would that or something like that work?

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Nice one, Wolf. Love that we’ll have ‘The One that got Away’ again, and a Photo Contributor prize would be great.

Your Upvotes per Photos Submitted ratio sounds like a pretty good option. It would rely on the preferences of a smallish group of photo voters, but that’s only a minor drawback.

Another ratio option would be Most Photos Selected per Photos Submitted. This would be a similar quality award but a little more achievement biased. Same minor drawback as above.

The Most Winning Pictures option would reward quality too, since monthly winning captions often benefit from highly captionable images. There is the piggyback factor with this though.

I can’t think of any other possibilities at present, but if anyone else can it’d be good to hear.

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I’m all in favour of spreading awards as much as possible particularly for newcomers. I think there could be lots of prizes that don’t have a monetary reward. Each monetary prize requires Chris to transfer money to someone’s account and a lot of captioneers would be just as happy with a digital trophy. Having some additional non-monetary prizes would help spread the love. The more automated these prizes the less work they would create each year.

Examples might be:
Most photo competitions won in a week, month or year
Most consecutive photos won
Most captions receiving 10 or more votes (and even >20, >15, >5, >2 categories)
Slowest caption to win a photo competition ie. added longest time after a photo appears
Best cat or dog caption (can’t be automated but wouldn’t take too long to identify the top scoring cat and dog captions)
Best caption with ‘Dave’ or ‘Tina’ in it
Highest scoring song caption (would have to include the musical note advised by Chris to make an automated search possible)
Most excruciating pun (preferably one that causes pain to even the keenest pun addicts)
Longest caption to win a photo
Shortest caption to win a photo

There are many more I’m sure other captioneers could add. Each award could have a newcomer category and have first, second, third, fourth and fifth places to increase the number of awards yet further. The ideal would be to have so many awards that most people would manage to get some kind of award. If it looks like someone isn’t going to get one we could even look at that person’s captions to help us think up a new one that they could win.

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All good points Steve.

I think though, if something like this was introduced it would need to be separate from ‘The Daves’ as these are specifically cash award prizes.

I did think of numerous ideas for categories before first pitching it properly to Chris. Puns, narratives, statements, long, short, etc, but ultimately any of these can (and do) win monthly prizes and gather supervotes so are covered in terms of recognition within existing categories.

In terms of newbies, I agree we should introduce some recognition of achievement. My own personal preference would be to unlock more features and quotas etc based on how they’re getting on within their first year.

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Just a thought and yes, this was heavily influenced by a caption picture very recently submitted but I thought the suggestion that Dave should remain faceless was a good one as Dave appears in many formats.

Should Dave be wearing a small cauldron or some other article over his/her/their head to obscure Dave’s features? :thinking:

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@The_Wolf has generously donated his latest cash prize back to caption.me, plus an extra £20, in order to bump the Dave Award cash prize fund to £280 - £40 per award :tada:

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There are loads of great suggestions for awards, but let’s settle on seven (£40 per award, with the total prize fund at £280).

I have chosen the following for now - a combination of @The_Wolf and my preferences (if that’s good for you, Wolf?):

  • Caption of the Year (shortlist is the monthly winners, vote open to everyone)
  • Most “LOL” Supervotes
  • Most “Creative” Supervotes
  • Most “Clever” Supervotes
  • Best Finder
  • Best Caption Quality (highest votes:caption ratio, for those who added ten or more captions)
  • The One That Got Away (shortlist comprised of the top ten captions that didn’t win a cash prize. Vote open to everyone)

In fairness to those who prefer other categories, how about we say everyone is free to add a new prize category, as long as they can personally contribute the extra prize money to cover that new category?

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This all looks good to me, Chris.

Absolutely. :+1:

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I’ve just thought of a category I’d like to sponsor:

  • Best Captioneer from New Zealand

Happy to put up £40 … or even £400 :wink:

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Hi Captioneers.

The Dave Awards are nearly here and winners will be announced over the course of a full week, commencing 11th December.

The categories for this year’s Daves are.

  • Finder Award (Announced Monday 11th at 9pm)
  • Creative Award (Announced Tuesday 12th at 9pm)
  • Clever Award (Announced Wednesday 13th at 9pm)
  • Lol Award (Announced Thursday 14th at 9pm)
  • Quality Award (Announced Friday 15th at 9pm)
  • The one that got away Award (Announced Saturday 16th at 9pm)
  • Caption of the year Award (Announced Sunday 17th at 9pm)

The first 5 awards are based on site data over a 52 week period. ‘The one that got away’ and ‘Caption of the year’ are awards that can be voted on by all in the general forum. Voting will commence on 11th December and will remain hidden until the winners are announced.

Each winner will receive a Dave Award in their Captioneer profile and a £40 cash prize.

Good luck to all and happy captioning.

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LOL Award - 2023
Clever Award - 2023
Finder Award - 2023
Quality Award - 2023
The One That Got Away - 2023
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The “top prize winners” leaderboard now includes Dave Awards, and here are the latest rankings:

image
image527×684 89.4 KB

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First Dave Awards… done and dusted. Well done to all the winners and runners up in each category.

I wanted this to be a bit of fun and I think it has been! :joy:

Huge shout out to our Commander-in-chief, Mr Chris Beach. He added a massive chunk of cash into these awards, on top of his amazing generosity in funding the monthly prizes. Additionally, he’s spent a lot of time and put in a huge amount of effort into making these awards run smoothly. Hats off to you mate, for these awards, and in general, you’re a star.

Thanks to everyone who got involved with the design of the trophy! Still makes me laugh looking at it now. Also thanks to everyone who has voted during these awards and has got involved in the forum with their funny and witty comments.

Caption.me really is a team effort when you think about it, from the workings of the site itself, to the photos, to the captions, to the finders, so it’s also been nice to highlight (in data), recognise and then award some different areas of achievement. It would be nice to add some extra categories in the future if possible too.

4 prize winning captions this year (bonus prizes) unfortunately slipped through the net and ended up in Limbo due to technically not fitting into ‘Caption of the Year’ or ‘The one that got away’. These 4 captions were

So a big shout out James, Chris K, Stephen and Ian. All brilliant captions.

I need to go now. Security has contacted me and said that Crunchy has downed 2 bottles of Champagne at the after-party and he’s trying to hit Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson over the head with his ‘heavy’ Dave Award. That bloody Crunchy :worried:

Happy captioning everyone. :smiley:

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Loving The Daves. Feels like something that should be more prominent and the Scores page should show the winners.

I don’t see a Dave award on John Harrison’s profile page for Caption of the Year.

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