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.

The audience view shows a fatigue score and a resting count when the data exists.

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.

What is not here yet

A public reputation score and full churn forensics are on the roadmap. Do not expect a live “reputation” number in the dashboard today. Use the audience and analytics views you have, plus restraint.

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.