Oftentimes, when I have trouble running an entry, I first try to seek support from the author; I really hate to just mark entries as N/W unless I really can't get it to work, to be respectful of the time and effort that the author sunk into making the game.

The best way to do that seems to be to comment on their latest diary entry.  Alas, not all entries have diary submissions, so I don't really have a way to ask questions or give non-rating-related feedback to the author.  I could open a thread in the discussion board but then the author is not notified by e-mail.  For one game, I ended up opening an issue on the GitHub repository.

Maybe there could be some standard way to interact with the author, by having some comment thread on the entry itself, or something like a pseudo-diary entry that gets created when judging opens to get support from the author on getting the game to run?