Thanks for clarifying this! Certainly for me I was worried about when I should set a game to fully visible. It was enough of a trick to figure how to put it into tester-only mode the first time.
I wondered if I was just being a nitpicker when I suggested it so I'm glad this happened.
As an IFComp entrant it's neat to have stuff done automatically. When it's manual, stuff is tricky.
It's likely I won't be entering this year, but if I did enter, I'd be grateful for a brief (opt-in) email that would 1) remind entrants with 8 hours to go to set things to public and 2) double-check with people after the deadline that, yes, they did indeed make their entry public.
Doing so should of course be on the writer, but all the same, if we have 20 entrants and everyone is 95% sure they'll check off, one is expected to forget. So it's a potential nuisance for the organizer(s) but one worth taking.
As someone who has entered an itch.io jam, I know to check itch.io in a browser where I'm not logged in before making something public. But it just seems like the sort of thing someone can forget.
I don't know how much leniency you'll want to give anyone who submits a game and leaves it private--I don't know if that's in the rules. But I do think it's worth checking with a day left to say "Hey, make sure the game is public." It might even be worth checking if there is an automatic way to set a project to public without going through the web interface.
These thoughts may be a bit long, but I wanted to share anything that might be useful, since when to set a project to public has always nagged me a bit. EctoComp tends to be very forgiving, and it looks like ParserComp's rules are too. But I'm convinced there are bumpers competitors may be able to use to make sure that the rollout is smooth and their projects go public at the right time.