Frankly, the old way always seemed to punish the wrong contestant, anyway. Automatic disqualification made more sense when the matches were 1 hour, but even at 24 hours, allowances had to be made for how unreliable the boards were back then. Things really began to get out of hand during the 48-hour matches, which started while I was taking a few years off from the internet.
Inevitably, the judge(s) would put the onus onto the on-time competitor to magnanimously allow the other entry to be judged – which they always did because, frankly, winning a match through disqualification is unsatisfying and saying “no” would seem petty.
I’m personally ashamed for ever putting that burden on any contestant (and I’ve done it multiple times), but with no other recourse established in the rules, it was that or an abrupt and unsatisfying end to the match.
After that, one of three things would happen:
1: The late contestant would decide their entry wasn’t worth finishing and concede, which was essentially the same result as a disappointing disqualification victory.
2: The late entry would lose and the contestant would wonder if they ever really had a chance to begin with. Justifiably, since the rules were pretty vague in order to allow judges leeway in how they wanted to penalize such entries.
3: The late entry would win and the other contestant would wonder if the late entry had even been penalized in a meaningful way. In a way, they usually weren’t. Let me explain:
Points-scoring judges (that is, non-me judges) would mark off points in their “follow the rules” category, but it was always such a small percentage of total points that it often felt inconsequential.
Non-points-scoring judges (non-non-me judges) needed to enforce a penalty that still legitimately allowed for victory and, therefore, only used the punctuality as a tie-breaker. This was not good enough.