Any UNI account opens a competition leaderboard, including a free one. What you hit is a sign-in wall, not a membership wall. The leaderboard does not check your plan, whether you entered, or whether you registered for that competition. It checks one thing: whether you are signed in.
What you are looking at
Signed out, the table is replaced by a padlock, the heading Sign in to view the Leaderboard, and the line "Sign in to view the leaderboard and see how entries are ranked." The Sign In button carries the leaderboard address with it, so you return to the same page once you are through. The link beneath it goes to registration if you have no account yet.
The competition's cover image, title and tabs stay on screen the whole time, which is part of why the page reads as a paywall. It looks like a working page with the valuable part taken out.
Nothing on that screen mentions membership, and no membership check sits behind it. Every signed-in visitor sees the same full table.
What the table holds
Only entries that passed moderation appear. An entry still awaiting review, or one that was rejected, is not on the leaderboard, and its absence says nothing about how it scored.
The columns are Entry Title, Award, Project Score, Likes and Juror's Rating. Two of them can drop out: Project Score when no entry has been rated at all, and Juror's Rating when no juror has scored anything yet, so an unjudged competition shows fewer columns rather than a screen of zeros. Likes is never dropped, and shows zero when that is the number. You can sort on the scoring columns, search by title, and narrow likes and ratings to a date range.
Juror names are hidden from everyone except UNI staff. Scores are attributed to "Juror 1", "Juror 2" and so on, in a fixed order, so you can tell two jurors apart without learning who they are.
When there is no Leaderboard link in the sidebar
The sidebar shows a Leaderboard item only when both of these are true:
- The competition has at least one entry.
- Its shortlist announcement date has passed.
Before that, there is no Leaderboard item in the sidebar, though the address still works if you have it: open the competition and add /leaderboard to the end. So if you followed a link from an email or a shared post and the sidebar looks different from what you were told to expect, this is usually why.
If you are signed in and still cannot see it
Two cases are worth separating from the sign-in wall.
- An error rather than the padlock. "Failed to load leaderboard. Please try again." is a loading failure, not a permission one. Reload the page.
- An empty table. That means the competition has no approved entries yet, which is normal before moderation finishes.