Expired Postcards

@skyeryder it could also be that the delay in the country of origin is not due to the postal service but the sender might have delayed sending for a really long time for whatever reason… Or it’s a second card (they sent you one in 2020, it never made it, they decided to re-send but it was too late).

My memory on this may be faulty, but it seems like I was able to register a card that arrived just over one year late. Maybe it was almost a year. Do the expired cards disappear from the list after one year?

It’s not possible. Cards disappear from the list after one year.

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That’s good to know! Perhaps that is why some people keep lists on their profiles? It also explains why the expired cards that do appear, all seem relatively recent. I wonder why the disappear when it is not uncommon for a card to show up after a year? Perhaps this deadline should be extended with the current postal problems in many countries? It does tell me that I have many more expired cards than I realized.

It’s because most cards that didn’t arrive for a year are lost for good or were never sent. The admins explained it sometimes. They’re deleted to save server space.

Occasionally i check in on my expired cards. One for instance was sent to someone who sent 1 card and never returned to PostCrossing, and i have written that on off.
One however has been sent to someone who regularly logs in, has sent 22 cards but registered none! This strikes me as unusual and i wonder if they are registering any of their cards at all?
Surely if you never RECEIVED any cards, you would fall out of love with post crossing pretty quickly? Even if SENDING cards was your preferred PostCrossing activity?!

What do you think?

Hello @bella

We talked about that theme a lot and therefore I move your post to another topic.

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I wouldn’t be worried, they are probably marked inactive for some reason. Perhaps they are in the middle of moving or don’t have reliable access to post right now. Perhaps they don’t feel like burdening postal workers during a pandemic.

I’ve been inactive since December and my difference has grown quite large. I’m dreading the day I go back active and my address goes out two hundred times at once!

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… I have the same problem with Russia and Finland. one arrives and the other does not. not all countries are set up equally. hold on and carry on. Don’t let your fun spoil😉

I just received and registered a card from China that has been traveling for 242 days. Beautiful card and stamps, clearly written address in English. Never give up!

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My counter is below 50! But cards on their way to go from status Travelling to Expired.

To pick out two.
One to a rescued from a scarry man teddybear living at a woman. Sent polarbear mum and child.
One to a child account where I replaced two names J and Z to Z and J, to let ladies go first. To find out latsr that the family has another account with the replaced two names as well.
Obvious cards from Gambia and Bangladesj get there quicker then my cards with NL ID mailed out in DE.

More and more cards that do not fit in a userprofile have more chances to get expire…

I know @mundoo gave a solution on the old forum years back:
Uncheck your box and the Expired are hidden.

Those postcrossers are not in this topic I guess. So easy to do - should I just do that…

Yes.

Mail is taking longer and longer to be delivered the last 2 years due to the current world pandemic affecting transport routes and deliveries.

Standard mail, for example, is now going from Australia to countries (that are accepting our mail) by sea. :sailboat: Aust Post are listing 2-3 months delivery and say by sea and if any example of that has changed from last year, I don’t see it. My WPD cards from 2020 arrived many months after they were posted last year.

Look we ALL have expired postcards, both what we send and what is sent to us. It unfortunately is part of the Postcrossing experience. Postcrossing is very pro-active in dealing with this issue but at the end of the day if the member didn’t register your postcard then there is nothing much more we can do about it.
https://www.postcrossing.com/help/what-if-the-postcards-don-t-arrive-or-are-not-registered

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Thread title

I have two sent postcards that got expired today. One of the cards is to European Russia and I wrote the address in Cyrillic (I can write it) and Latin. Now, that user has received cards from the same country I live in that were sent much later than me. And what are the chances of the envelope getting lost? Is there a possibility the user is not registering the cards on purpose? Or am I just paranoid? Either way, it’s a bit disheartening.

Also, why do people register cards in bulk even if they are not on holiday? It’s annoying and it blocks people’s free slots. A card has been travelling 260km for 27 days now… That specific user last bulk registered yesterday but my card is no where to be seen, and we live in bordering countries.

Sorry for this ~rant~, if you could call it such. I’m a still a new user so those things are very aggravating to me.

People could bulk register for a number of reasons: health ones (we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, and some of us have chronic diseases), logistical ones (having a PO box and being unable to go there every day), postal ones (some countries will bulk deliver the mail for, again, many reasons)…

Your card may have been lost or it may simply be late, we have no way of knowing, and 27 days is honestly not that long. Just be patient, one of the cards you sent will arrive and you’ll be able to send another one. In the meantime you can have fun here on the forums, there are plenty of tags, round robins and games to play!

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It happens and there might be several reasons for that. Don’t forget we’re still dealing with a pandemic which might take cards take a very long time to arrive. Even to neighbouring countries.

Furthermore some people don’t have the opportunity to immediately register cards because of not being home or whatever. I understand when you’re still new that this sucks, but it’s the way postcrossing works and you’ll just have to be patient. If you want to receive more cards, you can always join swaps and games and lotteries here in the forum :slight_smile: that’s what I did in the beginning :slight_smile:

Enjoy Postcrossing and don’t let this get you down!

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Just because the cards they’ve registered were sent from the same country and later than you doesn’t really mean anything. I sent several cards within the UK for World Postcard Day, including one to my mother. One was delivered in Wales the next morning, 220 miles away… but the one to my mother, 10 miles away, took 10 days – even with the same postage affixed!

There are all kinds of factors. Maybe for some reason the scanning machines had trouble with your card, and it had to be handled in person. Maybe it seemed to work but initially misdirected your card. If you don’t live in the same town, maybe the other members’ cards are travelling from places with closer travel links to the other country…

There are a lot of reasons this might happen. For instance, I was apparently “bulk registering” my cards at one point… because the Post Office was not delivering to my house every day. Because of the pandemic, they didn’t have enough postal workers to deliver my mail more than once a week, or at one point, more than once a fortnight. There was nothing at all I could do about that, no matter how much it might have upset the people sending to me.

Perhaps the member has to use another address for their cards, and can only pick them up in batches… perhaps they have two addresses, and regularly travel between the two. Perhaps they aren’t very well, or they’re not very good at computers, and need help from a family member who visits frequently who helps them register the cards…

Obviously these are all just “what if” scenarios, but it may help with the frustration to think about all the different possibilities and imagine the person living at the other end. We’re all on Postcrossing because we like getting mail and exchanging cards, so the vast majority of users are doing their best to play by the rules and make sure they can keep participating for a long time to come. There are many reasons why your cards might just not have arrived yet.

I hope our ideas here help reassure you, anyway! It’s definitely frustrating sometimes, waiting for cards to arrive, but most of the time it all comes out in the wash if I give it time, so I’m sure the same will be true for you.

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If you sent that card in an envelope to Germany, Post.nl might have handed it over to a private mail company. Some of those are not very reliable.
I once had a card from the Netherlands to me traveling in an envelope, that took more than a year although all postmarks were dated within some days. But the local private mail service here needed more than a year.

I hope this is the right place to vent this concern…

I’ve only been a Postcrosser for two months and three days…and already it looks like my third and fourth posted/travelling postcards are going to expire:

I really worry that this is going to make me look like an unreliable newbie Postcrosser :weary:. It makes me feel like one!

I feel you….for some reason something is happening to incoming postal in Belarus because every time I send a postcard to Belarus it never arrives I already have 6 expired cards to Belarus and now I got one that’s still traveling and it’s been almost 40 days now :confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused:

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Don’t worry, nobody can see your expired cards. Also, they aren’t expired yet, there’s still some time. And, everyone has expired cards, sometimes they even arrive after a long time.
If it helps, these are mine right now.


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