About Reading and Responses

I wonder if anyone can tell me what happens when I’m reading someone’s story, and I get called away from my computer or have to go to the bathroom or whatever? Many times I’ve gone away from the computer for hours (to cook dinner, most likely), or to answer the door, etc., and when I come back, there’s the same story I was reading, and I’ve left it up on my screen all that time.

Do the authors not get credit when a story is left up for an unreasonable amount of time? What happens? When I come back and finish reading the piece, do they then get credit as if I never went off and left…