Glitter's Cap-Page Board

Cap-Page Board logoes over the years. (click for larger view)

One of the many capping venues available on the internet.

Origin

In 2001, GlitterRock began making preliminary plans for creating a new caption site. His original intention was for another "real-time" venue, like Caption This and Inventing Situations. He approached GersonK for aid in learning the details of php and everything else he needed to know. It's a credit to Gerson's Job-like parience that he didn't give the dimwit an AOL Instant Messenger-whack upside the head. While he slowly learned bits and pieces, the nuiances of coding frustrated Glitter, and he started considering other options. In 2002, he decided on using a message-board format and eventually chose ezboard for its location.

One of the first names thought for the site was "Glitter's Back-Alley Cap Shoot." This was quickly dismissed, and "Glitter's Farout Groovy Dynomite Cap Party" was thought up. This got as far as the logo-stage when it was reduced down to "Glitter's Cap-Post Party." This looked to be the final name (Glitter even went as far as registering "glitterscappostparty" with ezboard for the URL). But in the end, he decided on "Glitter's Cap-Page Board" for the moniker (though the first logo did mistakenly call it "Cap-Age," later variations correct this to the proper title). It's routinely called the Cap-Page Board, Cap-Board, or CPB these days.

Evolution

GlitterRock originally planned on screengrabbing 2-3 different programs per day for posting and showing. But the time and effort involved immediately put the brakes on that. New galleries were initially only posted 3-4 times a week if possible, and would remain up for a week to caption before being replaced. Over time, a routine and rhythm built up to the point where the CPB currently posts a new gallery every day, and a new Porch Swings gallery every month.

History

One of the CPB's earliest events was the Capper Presents...Spotlight, where a Capper would be selected to choose a week's worth of programming for everyone to cap. Since 2002, over 20 different Cappers were chosen to be put in the Spotlight (including a special spotlight on Sarah, DiscoBoy and Nyssa23's first child, which featured a week of baby-oriented programming). In 2006, the event was put on indefinite hiatus.

In September 2002, GlitterRock resurrected the popular Mystery Science Theater 3000 "Turkey Day" celebration (a name given to the Comedy Central MST3K-marathons shown over the Thanksgiving holiday). He polled the CPB members to vote for their favorite episodes of the show, and the most popular were screengrabbed and shown over the week of Thanksgiving. It's a tradition that has since continued every year.

At the request of one of the Cappers, James Bond debuted on the Cap-Page Board in January 2003. Every month thereafter, on the 7th (touted as "007 on the 007th"), a new movie would be shown. Timing and technical problems occasionally occurred, adjusting the schedule from time to time. But in December 2004, the run of the Connery/Lazenby/Moore/Dalton/Brosnan series (including the both the Barry Nelson and David Niven-incarnations of 'Casino Royale' and the apocryphal 'Never Say Never Again') came to a close. But James Bond will return...

In December 2003 in response to a suggestion from TheLurker, TheDiva put forward the idea of celebrating the following February with a 'Capper Crush Week.' The idea evolved and grew, and so many Cappers participated in requesting celebrities they thought were attractive that virtually the entire month of February 2004 was based around those celebrities, and it became known as Capper Crush Month.

Also in 2003, the first instance occurred of one of the CPB-Cappers other than GlitterRock screengrabbing a program. Soon, other Cappers offered to screen-capture shows for others to cap, and now the Capper Screengrabber event has a regular monthly slot on the Board.

In June 2003, GlitterRock marked the first anniversary of the CPB by picking a selection of screengrabs from the year's programming. Since then, every anniversary has been marked in much the same fashion -- though in recent years the celebration has stretched over five days, with the 'year in review' shots being picked by the Official Cap-Page Board Random Number Generator™ (in reality, a Random Clock Generator downloaded from CNet).

The same year, a request was made to show one of the "Friday The 13th" movies on the upcoming Friday the 13th. That kicked off a regular showing of the "FT13" series every month on the 13th (though, like with James Bond, timing and technical problems occasionally delayed or preempted showing), showcasing all eleven films (including 'Freddy vs. Jason')... and spawning the popular Jason Leopold Voorhees running joke. Since then, a special compilation of randomly-selected shots from the previously-screengrabbed movies has appeared every Friday the 13th.

In 2004, Cappers began mailing in DVD and VHS tapes to GlitterRock for screengrabbing. While initially the shows would appear irregularly, the Capper Contributor Program has since earned a regularly monthly slot on the schedule.

In October 2004, a horror-based story from Marvel Comics' "Star Trek" series was scanned and posted for frame-by-frame capping. It proved a great success, paving the way for other comic book appearances on the Cap-Page Board. In 2005 the feature was formally christened "Mystery Comic Theater" (an homage to 'Mystery Science Theater 3000'), and started appearing every two months. In 2006, it proved popular enough to earn its own monthly appearance.

In May 2005, a hacker made a devastating attack on the entire ezboard network, disabling many key systems and the network's site-backup memory. The end result wiped out countless data, affecting every message board in the network. For the Cap-Page Board, that meant that many galleries were deleted. Thanks to a number of Cappers (with special credit to Indomitus), a number of them were recovered for caption-saving.

In July 2005, a yearlong celebration of 'Star Wars' began, entitled (simply enough) The Year Of Star Wars. It started with a captioning of 'Episode I: The Phantom Menace," and continued through the other programs at a run of one per month. The six 'Star Wars' films were shown, as well as the two Ewok TV-movies, the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special (which had been promised and postphoned every year since 2002!), the Clone Wars animated series, and two DVD-compilations of the Ewoks/Droids Saturday morning programs. It is due to come to a close in June 2006 with "Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi."

And the legend continues....

Link

Glitter's Cap-Page Board