Wondering how many people have seen their own names or postcards featured on the main page? I realize most people can probably see when they send a card. However, for the first time since I joined, I happened to catch someone receiving my postcard in the “what’s happening now” section the other day, without realizing I’d gotten an email!
I just am curious to see how often others experience this. (Especially seeing someone receive a card from you!) Also, do you enjoy these moments? Or does it make you uncomfortable?
I’m new to this. Why do I never see where I’ve sent a postcard on the happening now section of the site? Or the postcards I’ve sent that have been received?
You probably would see your cards in the Happening Now section if you were looking at it the precise minute they were registered by the recipient. But there are a few thousand cards registered every day
What you can do is look at the Gallery (Explore menu) and see the most recent cards registered. You can even sort them by country. Or you can go to the Postcards menu and click on Sent or Received and see which of your cards have been registered.
There are lots of fun things you can do so I encourage you to explore. If, for example, you “Like” a card that you see in the Gallery, it will show up in your Favorites (part of your profile). And when you look at other people’s Favorites, you can “Like” any that you enjoy and they too will go in your Favorites. Then when people write to you, they can see what kinds of things appeal to you, and they may send something similar.
There’s also the Forum with lots of fun games, tags, round robins and lotteries to enjoy. The world of Postcrossing is wide and welcoming!
I’ve only seen myself once on there - after I got a new name to send a card to, I watched the “happening now” feed and it showed up after about a minute. Last night I got a notification for a received card and went to check the feed for a few minutes right after, but never saw it - either I had already missed it, or it was too far down the queue for me to wait for it.
I haven’t caught myself or noticed outside of sending one out as you mentioned, but it definitely would be neat to catch it when someone registers one of my cards!
It feels like an affirmation of doing the right thing - supporting the site that supports all of us. My image disappears in a short period of time as other Postcrossing supporters also step up to also offer support for this wonderful community.
I just caught it when one of my cards was registered, I was delighted - even thought of a screenshot. I have only signed up here in June, it is sent card no. 12
You may have a chance to see yourself at least sending a postcard. You need to refresh the page right around the time you decide to send one, then watch and wait. I think I’ve seen myself that way within about 5 minutes or less.
When I caught the person receiving a postcard from me (only once), it was about 2 minutes after the email had been sent. (Just to give you an idea of the time it takes. It probably varies by how many people are active in the moment, however. This was during the lull right before the 73 millionth postcard was registered, and only 500 or so people were registering cards per hour.)
When you have registered a card it took only a little time to see your name on the TV (other name for “What is happening now?”) And when you upload a picture of that card, you can see your name again.
I’ve seen my name a couple of times, and I took a screenshot when I saw my husband’s postcrossing name scrolling by. He wasn’t in the least bit interested.
But I did something different last week. Not my name - I happened to be on the site when I realised my name had just gone into the pool again. I looked at “What’s happening now”, or TV as I now know I can call it, and took screenshots of the page when I saw those people who were sending postcards to the UK. And sure enough, postcards have started to arrive from that day and the first to arrive were names on my screenshot. I do realise this makes me sound incredibly geeky!
I’ve done this before too! it works also when you go from inactive to active, and try to catch people sending to your country and then wait for those cards to arrive. It’s a sort of backwards way of doing it but almost as fun as clicking ‘send a postcard’ to see which country you get
I once deactivated my account for a month or so. When I re-activated it, I watched the ‘What is happening now?’ section for a few minutes and I saw people drawing my address. Well, what I actually saw was them sending a postcard to Poland (that’s where I was then), but the country is not as active as Germany, let’s say, and you don’t expect as many users, so I just kept the record of those user names and waited. Yep, they were all for me.
I think it’s quite cool to do so!
