I believe r/bestofredditorupdates usually just asks in the comments of the post so it’s public to everyone. Personally I don’t mind running on an honor system (since a fair share of the more popular HD posts are archived or authored by abandoned accounts) and if a write-up is reposted against the wishes of an author having a policy they can reach out to have the post here taken down.
For an example of a contacting the author issue though, the WoW write-up author was suspended by reddit and faik that was never revoked and the author never made another account. So there’s no way (that I’m aware of) to contact them and that’s a decently popular write-up that got voted an award by the subreddit community.