Onmyoji Fan Art Contest

No, I am understanding what you're trying to say, but perhaps you're not understanding fully what I've been saying. 



You were only talking about the contest category specifically. 'All categories' mean all the other categories in DA. The digital art, traditional art, fractal art, photography, etc. That's not what you're referring to, are you? If it was, it's a bug problem, and I haven't seen any such issue being complained about yet. Various Sorting/Browsing modes such as What's Hot, Popular (various time periods), Newest, etc are different from the actual DA categories. 

You do understand that's how the What's Hot, Undiscovered, and the other browsing modes work right? They are not going to stay in the "What's Hot" section for all the time. Or in the 24 hours section, or the other. Each has likely various algorithm for what will show up in each mode calculating what aspects of favourites, comments, etc are used. My own work appeared in what's hot section two days later and then went away after a day because there were other works that became "What's Hot" at that time. That was it. Same for other sorting/browsing modes. Other works became popular in the other modes and appeared in the "what's hot" section because of that. It's no different from works that were submitted in the first few days disappearing and going to way back in the back pages because other works became more prominent that were uploaded later. Other works that actually got removed from the contest category were because of rule violations (copies, miscats, TOS violations, etc), which they take time to remove as well. 

If you got the response from support the same answer, that means there were very likely no bugs present and what is generally the case and is how it works is something that's unknowingly causing misunderstanding and freaking the people out. Were there any bugs present and they investigated, they wouldn't have given that response. How do you think I would be feeling if I were saying there's no intentional disappearing happening and that's how it's supposed to work and someone's still not understanding that's how it's going to work. It seems both the support and apparently I am saying the same about how generally the sorting modes work. And how as long as the entry shows in the contest category, it will be eligible for judging. However, from somewhere, that's unsupported from the helpdesk, you are pointing out some other ways (other than how the browsing mode works) the works disappeared - intentionally, which is not possible if it weren't for bugs. Further explanations that it's not the case is still making you adamant on stating the same thing. At this point, all you can do is contact them to investigate further as a bug report (there's a special category in the help desk for that) or accept that perhaps what we are saying is how it's supposed to be, and it's a misunderstanding on your part in the general way it works. If you did, in fact, use the bug report section for reporting and they haven't found anything and said the same response, that means no such scheme took place.