Fatigue and attention

Attention is the scarce resource. EngageNudge treats protection as part of the product, not a buried toggle.

What fatigue does

People who have received too many Nudges in a window can be rested. They stay subscribed. They are skipped until they are eligible again. That is intentional. A skip is a decision, not a failed campaign.

There is no fatigue score to read any more, and the audience view no longer carries a fatigue tile. What the engine gates on is send pressure: a count of how many nudges a subscriber has already had in the recent window, checked against the caps in your attention policy. A count is something you can verify against your own send history. A score was not.

Audience still shows how many people are resting, which is the number that tells you whether the caps are doing anything.

Your sending pace

Settings → Sending holds one dial from 0 to 100. It does not set a single limit. It interpolates all of them at once: the daily campaign budget, the per-subscriber daily and weekly caps, and the minimum spacing between two pushes to the same reader. Move the dial and the panel shows the numbers it just wrote, so you never have to guess what a position means.

Three zones sit on the dial: conservative, normal, aggressive. Cooling and dormant subscribers keep their own stricter limits at every position, so even the top of the dial is not unlimited.

The autopilot

With autopilot on, the dial moves itself once a week from your own numbers, and the asymmetry is deliberate:

Down fast. A spike in lost subscribers, or a week where most of the loss is people opting out rather than dead endpoints, pulls the pace down immediately.
Up slowly. Two healthy weeks in a row move it up a little.
Never into the aggressive zone. The autopilot has a ceiling. Going above it is a manual choice you make yourself, with the warning in front of you.

Every move is written down with its reason: which signal moved, what the number was, and which way the dial went. When nothing moved, that is written down too, with why. The point is that you can disagree with a specific adjustment rather than with a black box. Take the wheel at any time and autopilot switches off until you turn it back on.

Push reputation

Analytics has a Push reputation section: how often you send, how people respond, and how fast you lose subscribers, rolled into one delivery-health read with the weekly history behind it. It is guidance about your sending, not a browser's internal score, and it never blocks a send of yours.

Do not confuse it with the Nudge Score on Overview. Reputation is about delivery health. The Nudge Score is about the health of the whole programme.

Send/no-send

The Decision Engine can recommend skip for a story even when someone is not fatigued: weak fit, low expected value, or policy. Dashboard compose can still send. Automated RSS will not override a skip unless you switch the feed's override on, and even then the daily cap, the minimum delay, plan limits, the send pause and consent still hold.

You should not turn every story into a Nudge. If you need a blast-everything tool, this is the wrong product.

Why wasn't my Nudge sent?

A Nudge card that reads Not sent means the run reached nobody. It is not an error and it is not a decision you made. The send path held everyone back, and the card now says which part did it. Expand Why? for the numbers and the setting behind each one.

The reasons, and what changes them:

Everyone had reached their send limit. Your daily cap, weekly cap or minimum spacing. Change it in Settings → Attention policy.
Cooling down after not clicking. Subscribers who have stopped engaging carry a tighter cap of their own (one a day, three a week, twelve hours apart). Your policy dial does not move this one; re-engagement does.
Everyone on this list is resting. Dormant subscribers, silent for a month, are left out of broad sends. Controlled by Dormancy in your attention policy.
It was quiet hours. Either yours or the subscriber's own window. See Nudge hours below.
No one matched this audience. The topics, interests or device filters on the campaign matched nobody.
Sending is paused. The send pause in Settings.
Several limits applied at once, no single cause accounts for most of it; the breakdown lists them all.

Before you send, the confirmation dialog shows the same numbers as an estimate: how many can receive this now, how many cannot, and why. If nobody can, the send is refused there rather than starting a run that cancels itself minutes later.

Nudge hours

Nudge hours are the window your site will not reach readers in. The small hours, usually. Set them in Settings → Site → Attention policy: a start, an end, and the time zone they are read in.

The time zone is the site's own. Pick where your readers are, not where you are. If you run sites for more than one region, each one carries its own zone, so "22:00–07:00" means the same local night on every one of them. The field shows the current time on the site so a wrong zone is obvious immediately.

Two things behave differently inside the window:

Automatic sends from a feed are held, not dropped. An article that arrives at 03:00 is scheduled for the minute the window opens and goes out then. Nothing is lost, and nobody is woken up. The feed card shows it as held until your nudge hours open.
A manual send you start yourself is your call. Subscribers inside the window are skipped for that send, and the card says how many. Use Send anyway to reach them regardless.

Your readers can also set their own quiet hours through the preference centre. Those are never overridden, not by an override, not by a breaking send.

Sending anyway

Restraint is the default, and the platform will argue with you, but it will never stop a send silently. Send anyway appears both in the confirmation dialog and on a Not sent card, and it sends on your own call.

An override relaxes exactly four things: your daily and weekly caps, the minimum spacing, the tighter cooling caps, the dormancy exclusion, and your site's quiet hours. Afterwards the card says what that cost: "Sent to 120, of whom 85 were past the recommended limit", and the send is recorded as an override in your restraint receipts.

An override never bypasses: a subscriber's own quiet hours, unsubscribes and dead endpoints, your plan and fair-use limits, the DPA, the send pause, or a feed's own daily cap and minimum delay. Those are not recommendations.