Suggestions To Improve Create A Caption

If so, or if you can get any stuff, maybe put that up as a prize or something?

The contest’s are too short IMO

First part (24-48 hours) could be run as the current format. People suggest captions and rec feature is used to filter the finalists. The number of finalists may depend on a minimum number of recs. Then in a new post or by bumping and editing the original post add a poll and people could vote on the poll for the best caption. Actually there may be another round where the community also choses the picture to run the contest on. This way each week we can run a contest and there may be an overall winner after some number of weeks.

The schedule could look like this:

Picture round (Monday – Tuesday) : Editors post candidate pictures and a poll.
Elimination Round (Wednesday – Thursday) : Community sends captions for the poll winner picture and recs are gathered to determine the finalists.
Final round (Fri-Sat-Sun) : Community votes by a poll for the winner. In addition, users can suggest pictures at the comments for next week’s contest to help editors.

I believe, a periodic schedule and rounds like this will get more people involved and make the contest much more fun. You don’t have to win it all, you can be quite happy when your picture suggestion is chosen for the next contest or your caption makes it to the final round. Statistic lovers can keep a running tally of the contributions made by the users.

As for keeping it at the front page, I don’t know how much power editors have but there may be a constant location at the sidebars sort of like a featured story or the current “Quotes from Coaches” box/block. So even if it is not at the center column of the front page I can scroll there and click my way to the relevant post.

Another way to make people access to the contest may be using a tag/category specific to these kind of contest posts (like the current “Diversions” category) and then add a menu item (like Roster) or a constant link to that category page. So even if I don’t see the post at the front page I can click there and find the latest post.