First, I'm going to stand by what I said in my previous entry, that yes, the judges do, in fact, read all the entries submitted, that is, of course, if your story passes the initial screening process. For example, suppose you wrote 10,000 words and mistakenly wrote 1000 when it asked for the word count on the submission form. In that case, the judges will interpret that as the writer having only written 1,000 words, and thus the story hasn't met the criteria of being at a minimum of 2k, nor is it the judge's job to check whether this is a mistake or not.
Of course, this year, there was an additional question of whether the story fits the word count requirement, which would also clue them into the writer possibly having a typo which in turn would result in this year them checking. But there are other things. The form, for example, asks for how we used the prompt and why our stories are marked as mature, but if they discover from this that the story isn't focused on a prompt or that the writer got too far away from what they were asking for with the changes they made, or that there is definite trigger content that would result in instant elimination and from their the judges wouldn't read the story.
As for what I was wrong about is that only one read from the stories writer counts.
And yes, there is a way to potentially track how many unique readers one has during a given time period - sort of. "Unique readers are tracked only if someone is logged in and hasn't read the story in a 24-hour period." In other words, for stories that aren't marked as mature, an ambassador doesn't have to be logged in to read the story. In the case of mature stories, it is possible to see if there were unique readers during that time period. Still, mature stories are also stories that are likely to run into a problem with the content criteria.
Unique readers also don't have to do with views.
Given the fact I was wrong about our reads not counting more than one, it is possible for all the reads on a story to be from the reader. And thus, yes, it is possible a writer did notice there were no additional reads. To assume this is because the ambassadors are being lazy rather than because the story ended up being eliminated during a given round--writing 2k isn't the only criterion, as I said.
Having checked out a few more of the stories of those who are upset at having been eliminated, I've discovered three which would have been eliminated the moment any ambassador clicked on the summary for not being properly rated, as the writer(s) openly admitted their story shouldn't be read by the younger Wattpad members. Still, as I said, either in the last chapter or one of the previous three chapters, there are only two ratings on Wattpad, the non-mature rating, which is content that is appropriate for all Wattpad members, and the mature rating, which is not.
And yes, Wattpad likes to play it safe regarding mature content by making sure anyone without an account or anyone under seventeen (unless they lied about their age) can't read any content not meant for all Wattpad users. And I know there are those who disagree with this, even though there are very good reasons for safeguarding, which isn't the same as censorship. That debate isn't something I'm going to get into here.
What's important is that the ambassadors can't let an entry that isn't properly rated through. And even if it is properly rated, should there be potentially triggering material for that age group is grounds for elimination, which might be the reason why my ninth entry was eliminated during the first round, although there are other reasons I've contemplated.
Back to me checking out a few more of the stories, without naming names, I also discovered one where I could tell the prompt the writer was using from the summary. I could also tell from the summary that the story was missing a key detail from the prompt, which would be enough to get the story eliminated during screening, as what I saw would have been clear to the ambassadors from how the writer filled out the question of how they were using the prompt.
