I have forwarded our questions to Liz in the Fantastical contest section as we have discussed. Please, support in that thread! Thank you! 
Dear @Liz,
I hope you are great. As you may know, I have created a thread specifically destined to find how to balance the chances of small authors to get noticed. (App: supporting small authors discussion) Many people offered their opinions, we had quite a productive discussion where both emerging writers as well as big moguls took part. Since so far contests are the main way for smaller authors to get noticed, most of the suggestions concerned these contests. However, we got stuck because we realised that we do not understand your judging criteria and system very clearly.
Here is the list of questions we have formulated for you. Please, note, that I am speaking not just for myself but on behalf of many people who commented on my thread and would like to know the answers as well.
Here is what we would like to clarify (credit to @EliseC for her great input)
Is every story being read? (At least one episode) Is every story is being assessed against the rubric or only those which reader retention is high enough? In the second case we would like to clarify what this high enough would mean in percentage, ie if you only read stories that rate high enough according to reader retention, how much in percent does a story need to score in reader engagement to qualify for being read and assessed against the rubric?
Reader retention: is there’s a certain “checkpoint” that a reader must get to for them to “count”? Like, if someone enters a story, sees that there’s no CC and exits, does that automatically affect the reader retention? If someone enters a story and has it crash in a crowd scene every time so they can’t progress, does that affect reader retention?
To the above point: would it be considered more “fair” to track reader retention only from episode 2? So in this case, seeing who continues reading a story only if they already read the first episode? (That is a suggestion rather than a question)
Most of the participants in the thread’s discussion also agreed that we would like the contests and the judging system to be transparent, ie we would like to see all the results (engagement, rubric, theme fitting, accordance with the guidelines) However, since we do not quite understand how the judging works we would like to clarify that first so that we can work from that.Thank you very much for your reply. Kindest regards,
Alex and a lot of amazing people eager to know the answers