Nothing in this cyber world is more exciting than the Cappernatorial election. Except for Capping. And a few other things.

It all started with Lanzman and his revitalization plans for the Capper eGroup.

Thanks to Lanzman, many old members have returned. Hey, I returned and no one here is older than me. So that proves it.

Then Daleman made his occasional post to let us all know how boring we were. (Not digging the Daleman. Just reporting the news. But not all the news. Just the dirt.)

Well, nobody wants to bore Daleman less than I so I took the bull by the horns (or, I should say, “took the alleged bull” because the truth of it all was uncertain) and wrote a “How can we stop boring Daleman” poll. (more…)

Round Robins…remember those? Well, it’s been awhile, but it’s time yet again for another one. So if you’d like to participate, we’ll start all the fun on Wednesday, January 31. There’s still plenty of time to sign up. Hope you’ll play along! – UnReality

I’m thinking of finally letting people protect their handles on Inventing Situations, but would like to get some feedback and give some warning before I throw the switch. It would probably work thusly: if you’ve registered a handle at sector7g-zz9 then you’d have to be logged on to use that handle on IS (even if you only registered it for use on Wasting Precious Time or the movie catalog). The submit caption form would include a password field so you could log on and submit a caption in a single swoop. But if you haven’t registered, then you’d be able to just leave the password blank and keep capping as always. In the past I’ve waffled and given reasons not to do this, but I’m starting to think it’s finally time to go ahead with it.

To my mind, here are the major pros and cons of my proposed system.
Pros:

• Allows people to protect themselves against password theft (which I still think is a very rare occurrence).
• If done properly, should be low impact. Little to no effect on those who choose not to use it, and just an occasional password entry for those who do use it.
• Will allow for addition of things like capperwiki profile links on people’s captions.

Cons:

• Security on the site is still sort of weak: only as secure as your email account, no https, and so forth and so on.
• System requires separate registrations to protect alternate and holiday handles. (It would still be relatively easy to flip between handles, though.)
• Some people registered for WPT or the catalog, but don’t want to have enter their password to cap. Or they forgot their password and lost access to the email account they signed up on, requiring manual intervention to get their username back.

If this happens, it won’t be for another month or so, but since this is a major change, I thought I’d get feedback to see if I need to do things differently or not at all. Thoughts?

Long time capper The GrayZombie has been elected Mayor of the Capper Egroup. We wish Mr. Zombie congratulations, underwear, and braaaains. He’s posted his acceptance speech over at GlitterRocks’s Cap-Page Board.

Now, I could take this moment to split semantic hairs like how the title went from Mayor of the eGroup back when Soozcat held it to Capper Mayor now, or the fact that he really shouldn’t have said “I will not dictate how…Inventing Situations…[is] to be run” but rather “I can not”, but that would be petty. Oh wait, I guess I just did (Worst Hair Splitting. Ever.) If you haven’t checked out the egroup or Glitter’s yet, you should probably take a moment to do so, I’m confident they’ll just increase your appreciation of capping.

[Edit 1/12/7 2:00 AM] Just thought I should add some more thoughts: The egroup’s as close as we’re going to get to a public commons amongst the cappers. It may have some signal to noise issues and occasional delusions of grandeur, but every capper should at least poke their head in and get a feel for it and get to know some of your fellow cappers and have their say. If you don’t want your inbox brimming over in the heavy traffic times, just do the web only subscription and poke in every day or so.

The Cap-Page board is of course the opposition, but they’ve provided a fine refuge to many of the other cappers left high and dry by the loss of CT and may well have attracted more new cappers as this site has.

I’m far too tired right now to explain what the capper mayor is, why it matters, if it matters, or how it’s being chosen. Suffice it to say, it’s a capper egroup thing, and either you understand what that means or I’m not the guy to explain it to you. At any rate, this figurehead might get perceived as a figurehead over more than just the capper egroup, so you may want to join the group and have your say. Anyway, here are some captions from the candidates and others (including the election moderator, Xig. Do elections usually have moderator?)

IS will refrain from endorsing a candidate. We’re close to anti-endorsing a candidate based solely on their titular party allegiance, but that would be petty, even for a comicshopguyian figure such as myself.