charactersrus (charactersrus) wrote in rp_tutorials, @ 2010-07-17 15:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | resources: general, tools: general |
Mod Tool: Nudge
There's an Insanejournal feature I've come to love, but I don't think many other people have noticed it, decided to use it, or have thought about its potential application. I showed a friend of mine who mods how to do this, and he thought it was great. After the cut learn how to Nudge and what to use it for.
We'll worry about the mechanics of it first. Under the "Friends" section of the Insanejournal link bar on the left of your screen you may or may not have noticed a link called "Nudge Friends". Being the curious type person, I decided one day to see what this does/how it works. You start by clicking that link:
This takes you to a page which lists your mutual friends - people who you have friended who have you friended. It also lists how long it has been since they've updated their journal and has a link next to their name which says, "nudge them". Click that link.
Like many things on IJ, it takes you to a confirmation page, which shows you exactly the message the person you are going to nudge receives. Click the button to confirm you actually want this nudge sent.
And then you receive a confirmation the nudge was actually sent.
It's actually that simple. You're done. You've nudged someone!
Ok, so now you know how to nudge, but what does it look like receiving one? I mean what happens exactly? Basically, someone receives an e-mail. The sender is whatever you have your name listed as in your journal. It'll look something like this depending on what mail program they use:
And the message itself? It's exactly as IJ said it would be:
Cool, huh?
So it's a pretty nifty feature, and thankfully it's not overused. It could be a pain in the ass if people were always nudging each other. But why would you ever want to use this feature anyway?
Simply put: mods can use this for activity checks! It all depends on how you do your activity checks - maybe you require people to update their own journal every two weeks. It's pretty simple to get the list to sort by the amount of time since the last update, and nudge anyone who hasn't met that deadline.
I normally do my activity checks at a set time every month, and nudge those people who haven't met the activity requirements a few days before final checks. I tend to keep a list (arranged alphabetically) and then have the nudge feature list my mutual friends alphabetically. It can be a gentle reminder they need to update their journal.
There are a couple of downsides - first, you have to be mutual friends. As a mod, this isn't so bad. Most of the time people in your game will have the mod journal friended. If not, they probably don't want to be in the game anyway. Second, you cannot nudge someone who has updated in the past week. This can be bad if you've got people who use private filters that you can't see or who work on entries privately before making them visible to everyone or if you have people who post, but don't meet length requirements on their entries. IJ counts these things as updates - even if you don't.
However, all in all this feature is definitely handy, and can help a ton when it comes to activity reminders.