First and foremost, we feel your pain. We recognize that it's deeply unsatisfying to work hard all month, to achieve the win, and to wait for the confetti and accolades only to discover that you've missed them somehow.
We do all we can to make sure folks know it's necessary to enter the official challenge in order to get to the winner page. We place the large countdown banner on folks' dashboards. We talked about this directly in five or six emails in October and November. We reminded people on Facebook and Instagram. For reasons we outlined in this help desk article, we don't disable independent challenges, even though this causes some unfortunate confusion.
Believe us. If there were an easy way to switch people who reached 50,000 words to the official challenge, we would. But our website is old and our back-end is pretty clunky. Our admin tool is not built in a way that allows us to make a simple change. Making the switch involves going directly into the database, which is something that only a tech person can do (and working directly inside the database comes with its own risks). And even if it were easy for us to switch writers' projects, there's another layer of acrobatics to getting the correct winner's page to spawn after the 50,000 words has been reached.
That was a long explanation, but we took the time to give it because we want people to understand that it's not-at-all a straightforward switch, nor one we feel we can commit to at scale.
We know that this is one of many, many things that needs overhaul. Tech investment is at the top of our wish list right now. There is no comparison between the experience we are currently providing and the one we could be providing with a better website.