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I created a caption competition website seventeen years ago: https://www.caption.me/

Pulls funny photos from a Flickr group. People write funny captions and vote for their favourite. Some of today's active users have been on the site for more than a decade.

I used to pay the £50 monthly prize out of my own pocket, but some generous users offered to fund the prize themselves via a whip-round.

So the small amount of money from paid link advertising on my sites (approx £45/month) now covers the hosting. In my head, that means I can justify spending my free time modernising and grow the site. I'm slowly upgrading it from PHP to http4s+ReactJS

There are some fun tech things I enjoyed inventing on the site - real-time collaborative mind-mapping to help people think of caption ideas; bots that identify bad user behaviour and create forum topics to start a private discussion with the admin team; real-time updates using websockets; a system that automatically identifies the best voters and rewards them with a quota of "super-votes" they can use to vote more than once on the best captions.



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