36/48h lapse means "post every day", but there is enough room than people don't need to be online at the same time every day.
72h lapse means "post every other day" and leads to way lurkier games in general -> leads to people losing interest and flaking.
As someone who has flaked out of a few games, I'd say it's way better to be in a routine of posting every day and not being able to tell myself:"eh, I can skip a day, and nothing bad will happen".
36h timer being standard would probably be a good thing IMO. As would some kind of automated prodding, so the amount of prods is not so mod-dependent.
I don't think the amount of allowed prods affects much, as long as it's not a large number.
I have never been prodded on purpose, and I don't think many people have.
Having that asterisk at the end of my name in the playerlist is a mark of shame, and already works as a motivator at least as well as threat of being replaced would.
2 prods overall would likely just lead to more replaces, which is not a good thing IMO.
Scaling by game-length would probably make sense.
2 prods in a same game-day should probably always mean a replace, cause it would mean no attempt to correct the behavior.
1 prod on day 1 and another on day 6 does not indicate a pattern of lurking IMO.
Using vigshots for lurkers is just good vig-play. I dunno why it would need to be mechanically enforced.
That way fluffing it up doesn't actually prevent you from getting shot.
The problem is that sometimes vigs don't play sensibly, but that
should
have negative consequences IMO.
side note: I dunno why the convention on hydrae is that they post from a shared account. Having them post from different accounts would make dealing with them way easier.