I was under the impression that traveling cards from users that leave Postcrossing, were automatically registered.
Today however, when wanting to register a card, I got a message that the card could not be registered because the user was no longer active in Postcrossing.
Was I mistaken about this ?
No. When a member contacts PostCrossing to close their account, essentially leaving, yes - any cards are automatically registered. If they are no longer active (inactive), that is a different scenario. Presently, and for more than a year, I have been inactive on Official Postcrossing. But I am quite active on the other parts of Postcrossing. Hope that helps answer your question.
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Thank you for your reply, Ron.
I have 50 cards traveling at the moment. If I change my status to inactive, does that mean that all my cards that arrive at their destination can’t be registered, as long as I stay inactive ? That makes no sense to me. People use the inactive status to stop receiving cards because they are to busy with work or school or whatever. It would be very strange that that would cause cards to vanish into thin air.
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It’s actually the other way around, cards travelling to those users get automatically registered, so that other users, who had cards travelling to those leaving, won’t be left hanging with their cards expiring and eventually getting deleted at one year mark.
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No, cards from accounts of people who choose to go “inactive” can still be registered, and in fact you can even draw new addresses to send to while “inactive.” I’ve been doing so for months and all of my sent cards have been registered 
As for your original question, I believe delenn_mir’s answer is right.
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Thank you, Tara and Ola.
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I’m sorry, I don’t understand this…how come the card cannot be registered? I believed it would’ve been possible to register all the same. Could someone explain this again please?
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I think the user deleted the account (sometimes you can see this on registered cards when there’s no name but account closed).
So if this person sent you a card maybe two months ago and deleted the account one month ago, you are not able to register this card.
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Aren’t cards usually automatically registered when a person deletes the account?
Cards sent to this person are registered, but not the ones they sent, because that would be unfair.
Think that suddenly you would see a card in your received ones, when you didn’t get it in reality. That would cause so much “where is my card” and how this is cheating and you don’t get the cards -topics.
(Also it can be they ended the account and did not send the cards.)
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Thanks to the explanations, I understood now.
It would be nice to have a place to register cards received from closed accounts.
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@Lejo as @Tara_Bell and @delenn_mir clarified the situation. I would add this (copied from the banner of my inactive account):
“Your account is currently set to inactive. You will not receive postcards while your account is in this mode, but you can continue sending postcards if you’d like. You can change your account back to active at any time to receive any due postcards.”
■When it says “you will not receive any postcards in this mode,” I think the implication is about people drawing your address going FORWARD. Keyword is “I think” 
Maybe you can contact post-crossing to have the card registered by them if the normal protocol is not allowing you to register. That would be unfortunate if we couldn’t register cards due to the inactive status of an account.
This does not have to be unfortunate because it is no issue. Cards from users with a valid account can (almost) always be registered, no matter if the user is active or inactive. (Otherwise no one could go on a break to avoid receiving cards).
What seems to be the case here is that the account was deleted (due to various reasons, most likely because the user simply stopped and was responsible enough to close the account). Then cards can’t be registered anymore.
active: user can send and receive
inactive: user can send (until a huge difference between sent and received), but own adress is not given out
travel mode: user can send from a different place, own adress is not given out
closed/deleted: no contact to that user anymore possible
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The message from Postcrossing literally says “the sender is no longer participating in Postcrossing”. So we can assume the profile was removed.
However, cards sent and arriving before the removal, keep in everyones stats, were the senders name is changed to “account closed”. I don’t see why the registrartion can’t be done the same way for cards arriving after the closure, naming the sender “account closed”.
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I believe, when the account is closed, all their travelling card information is destroyed and hence can’t be linked to something that doesn’t exist at that time when registration would happen.
This only happened to me once, or I only remember one case.
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@Lejo If a user deletes account a question pops-up to mark travelling postcards that have been mailed out. If the deleter of accounts marks those ID’s then those ID info stays in the system and can be registered by recipent on arrival. If ID’s are not marked then not (you received one of such likely).
@cliffside Your implication is correct.
The inactive banner is incorrect. Postcrossing can not stop mailcarriers to deliver previous mailed out cards. Inactive postcrossers can still receive already travelling postcards and they do. Hence your address is not given out while inactive. @meiadeleite can you have a look at this and maybe change a little text in the yellow text banner if going Inactive.
@HM …thanks for repeating what I said. If you have a problem with the Postcrossing banner, I suggest you take it up with Postcrossing.
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When the recipient leaves Postcrossing and cancels their account, then all cards travelling towards them are registered automatically, so that the senders get their slots free.
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Alright, let me try to clear up some things:
- When an account is closed, any incoming postcards are automatically registered by Postcrossing as there’s no other way for them be registered afterwards.
- If the account being closed has traveling (outgoing postcards), the person is asked before closing the account if they were posted or not:
- If the person selects that they were posted, the postcards are not removed from the system so that the receiver can still register them.
- But if the person selects the option that says they were not posted, then they are removed from the database and thus can’t be registered anymore (since presumedly they were not sent).
This looks like the sender closed their account and selected the option saying that they didn’t post the postcards but… it seems they did in this case.
Obviously, we can’t control already traveling postcards (wouldn’t that be awesome?). We have updated the text to make it more clear that one will not be sent more postcards when inactive.
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