Finally, Inventing Situations has freed the common capper from the twin drudgeries of matching your caption to the grab and actually writing a caption! Just click the magic button – – and the Autocappomatic 4500 will not only write a caption for you, but it will pick an image to go with it; in that order. The cappomatic’s no prima donna either, it shares credit with you by just using your handle its logo right next to it. So, thank the Autocappomatic 4500 for this new progress and thank Competition too, because it was only by shamelessly following the competition that I realized just how much demand there was for this sort of thing.

(Note 12/16: The cappomatic won’t work unless you’ve made a cap that saved your handle lately – that is, you need to cap with cookies enabled first. So there.)

Of course, the Autocappomatic can use your help, so if you have some captions that just need NOUNs, VERBs, PLURALNOUNs, GERUNDs, CELEBRIRTYNAMEs or the like added, suggest them, and the cappomatic might use them.

I’d just like to point out that as long as you’re not afraid of somebody stealing your holiday handle, you don’t have to register it. All of the other advantages of being logged in – voting for your favorites, editing your captions, and now getting a link to your wiki profile – are all still available when you’re logged in as yourself but capping with a different handle.

To get the profile link all the time, you need to go to your sector7g-zz9 profile page and select “always” for ‘Display a link to my capper wiki profile”, otherwise I’ll go on assuming you’ve changed handles for anonymity, since I can’t read your minds (yet).  The “when posting with my handle” choice may be a little cryptic, but it just assumes that when you cap with a handle other than the one you’re logged in under, you want to be anonymous. I may be a little crazy for trying to build a system that supports logging in with anonymity, but both bogus handles and insanity are capper traditions, no?

You may have noticed that the gallery is arranged a little differently now. Instead of all the captions for a given grab being clustered together, the newest captions show up on top, regardless of their image. I think this makes more sense with a lot of the changes I’ve been making lately, like the ability to cap any image in the main gallery or the favorites gallery by clicking on it, and the way the fancy auto-refresh gallery needed a whole lot of pointless work if I was going to make it keep the old sort style. But, if you’re like me and you’ve been capping with the image sort for over ten years, this may be a tough change to get used to and if you really prefer the old style, just click the sort by image link over the captions and you can get the old style back for the manual refresh version of gallery.

I’ve also broken down and sort of given in to popular demand on the favorites gallery. You can now vote for as many captions as you like, but to satisfy me elitist leanings, the favorites gallery will only display the 18 most popular captions. I kind of feel like I should have figured that out sooner.

You might have noticed thumbs sticking up over the captions. They’re not part of my Fonzie obsession, they are instead proof that I’ve officially admitted to being a follower in the caption this like caption site community instead of pretending to be a leader like I once did. By clicking the thumb over a caption, you select it as your “current favorite” caption. That puts it on a page full of the popular favorites that you and the other cappers have voted for. If that seems a lot like a feature from some other capsite, that’s because it is, kind of. I like to think I’ve put my own spin on it. Captions stay on the favorites page for up to 24 hours after they were written, and you can only vote for one caption at a time. That is, as soon as you click the thumb, your previous vote is wiped out. My thinking is that makes getting on the favorites page more of an honor and keeps the voting from becoming too much of an obsession. To provide at least some enforcement of the one capper/one vote thing, you do need to be registered to vote. The honor system takes care of the rest. Note, there’s no rule against voting for your own cap – heck the first test vote was of, by and for me. If that’s how you want to spend your vote, be my guest. Thoughts? Complaints? Job offers? Share them.

I just felt that was the first thing I had to say. I know some people are going to freak when they see that password box. But if you leave it blank, and you’ve never registered at sector7g-zz9 or lustforlunch, you can cap just the same as you always have.

Anyway, inspired by equal parts competition, thinking about updates, and procrastination, I’ve finally finished the long promised use of WPT handles on IS. Of course it turned out that 90% of the remaining work was on tweaking the page layouts and a single bug. I hope it’s all pretty self-explanatory. If you want to protect your handle, register it. All that requires is a working email account (and they’re free and plentiful these days), and a minute. From there on, you’ll just have to occasionally enter your password along with your cap. You can still use whatever unregistered handles you want at any time. If you want a link to your capper wiki profile, once you’ve logged on, you can go to your profile link (it’ll be on the upper left of the screen, just under the mothership menu), and enter your wiki profile.

I also made a few other small fixes, including eliminating a weird wrap around that would occasionally happen with the paypal ad, and sending you back to the gallery after mailing a caption.