The Rules And How To Add Captures/Captions/Comments To This Board.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Please follow these simple rules for adding new screen captures to this board:

• Create a new topic and use as its subject the number of the DS episode from which your capture has come (i.e. "Episode #0217" or "Episode #0007" - and please DON'T FORGET TO ADD THE PRECEDING ZEROS because we'd like to make it possible for people to sort the topics by episode number (rather than the date the captures were last captioned) in case they'd like to read this board chronologically within the DS storylines). In the cases where an episode has multiple numbers, simply post the subject as follows: "Episode #0801/0802".
• The text of the screen capture post need only consist of one character, such as an asterisk (*), though if you'd like, certainly feel free to provide an explanation of what prompted you to post that particular capture. However, DON'T INCLUDE ANY CAPTIONS in this topic creation post. Captions should ONLY appear as the FIRST AND ANY SUBSEQUENT REPLIES.
• ATTACH THE CAPTURE to the topic rather than post it inline - meaning DON'T USE THE FORUM'S IMAGE TAGS along with your own URL like this:
  Code: [Select]
  [img]http://www.yoursite.com/cap.jpg[/img]We'd like the captures/captions to always be available for people to enjoy - and should something happen to your own Web space, your capture could easily disappear, leaving people without a clue as to what scene was being captioned.
• Please make sure that your screen capture is NO LARGER THAN 320X240 (OR EQUIVALENT DIMENSIONS OF 76800 PIXELS, i.e. 200X384, 240X320, 256X300, 300X256, 384X200, 400X192, etc). We want to be sure that the forum will have enough space to store as many captures as possible, and attaching images larger than that will most likely result in your topic being removed.
• And in the instances where you might like to post more than one screen capture from a particular episode, please post them as separate topics. Posting multiple captures in the same topic will most likely result in the removal of the extra(s).
• DO NOT START TOPICS ON THIS BOARD THAT DON'T INCLUDE A SCREEN CAPTURE!
• Posting replies about the captions others have made is more than welcomed.

Rules for captions:

• There's really only one - don't post anything that would violate this forum guideline:
  • 10. Please be aware that some posters may find messages containing explicit sexual content, including links to graphics or imbedded images that are pornographic in nature, very foul language, etc. to be objectionable and posts may be deleted from a forum for that reason.
  However, it will be fine to imply almost anything. For example, back in the days when the Sci-Fi channel provided screen captures of all its programming as it was being shown, they had a popular Web page on their site where viewers/fans could add captions to those captures as each came up (in fact that page is what inspired me to add this board to the forum - just don't ask me why it's taken THIS long for that inspiration to hit. ) and one of the cousins on this forum (who shall remain nameless) once provided the following caption to this capture:
  
  
  
  Willie: "Oh, yeah, Mrs.Johnson, just a little lower!"
  It's not at all explicit and it's completely up for interpretation. True, most of our minds will slip right into the gutter. But for all we really know, MrsJ might simply be giving Willie a really great and completely innocent foot massage. And anything more is completely in our own demented and/or depraved minds. And so long as in the estimation of the forum's admins/mods none of the captions cross that line, they'll be completely acceptable.

[Midnite]

CAPTION as defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary:

a: the heading especially of an article or document: TITLE  b: the explanatory comment or designation accompanying a pictorial illustration  c: a motion-picture subtitle


A line or 2 is fine, but scenes will now be removed per the forum guideline regarding fan fiction that all cousins agreed to during registration.  Perhaps that wasn't made clear enough before, and for that I apologize.  If a poster has a question about this, please don't hesitate to PM MB (MysteriousB), dom or myself.  Thanks!

[Midnite]

A.  Caption.  Is.  Not.  A.  Scene.

A caption is a brief joke-writing slam.  For the uninitiated, you're simply writing something funny about an image.  Capping is not writing an ongoing dialogue between characters.

[dom]

Please remember not to contribute captions in scene form (setup/postscript).

Thanks

[Mysterious Benefactor]

The upgrade to SMF 1.0.2 has brought along with it the ability to limit the amount of text in posts on individual boards. So, we've decided to take advantage of that feature here on the Caption This! board, and FROM NOW ON CAPTION POSTS ARE LIMITED TO 275 CHARACTERS.

We didn't reach that amount arbitrarily. In fact, we measured the length of all 680 captions that were currently on the board and discovered that the average length of a caption (including any of the forum's BBC tags, smiley codes, and/or special invisible characters like new line (hitting your keyboard's return key)) was 137 characters. So, in an effort not to stifle creativity, we've doubled that amount, added 1, and decided on a 275 character limit. Far from wanting to stifle creativity, we actually want to inspire it - and hopefully setting a character limit for this board will do just that. 

When posting comments about other cousins' captions, if a cousin thinks he/she will need more than 275 characters, he/she will need to quote the caption(s) they're commenting on to avoid the character limit. However, PLEASE DON'T TRY POSTING COMMENTS AND YOUR OWN CAPTIONS IN THE SAME POST TO BYPASS THE 275 CHARACTER LIMIT. Please post them separately. POSTS CONTAINING BOTH CAPTIONS AND COMMENTS WILL MORE THAN LIKELY BE REMOVED FROM THE BOARD IF THE CAPTION GOES OVER 275 CHARACTERS. AND SIMILARLY, CAPTIONS THAT ARE QUOTED SIMPLY SO THAT A NEW CAPTION MADE AS A REPLY TO THEM CAN GO OVER THE 275 LIMIT WILL MORE THAN LIKELY BE REMOVED FROM THE BOARD.

[Midnite]

For our newbie captioners:

A line or 2 is fine, but scenes will now be removed per the forum guideline regarding fan fiction that all cousins agreed to during registration.

Captions containing more than 2 lines of dialogue will be removed.  This is also explained in the other topic pinned to the top of Caption This!:

posts with more than 2 lines of dialogue are removed.

and is repeated throught the Caption This! board, such as:

If it helps, this is acceptable:

character #1:  blah
character #2:  blah

This is not:

character #1:  blah
character #2:  blah
character #1 or #3:  blah

And this isn't acceptable either:

#1 said or did blah.  Then #2 said or did blah.  Then #1 or #3 said or did blah.

We're not counting lines and removing posts arbitrarily.  We're removing scenes, period.

Hope that cleared it up for you.

Also:

Please remember not to contribute captions in scene form (setup/postscript).

To clarify, please don't cap action that occurs before or after (example-- ::runs from room:: ) or your caption may be subject to removal.

If anyone has questions, "To Caption This!" is open to posting.  Thanks!