I don’t understand how this fits this topic. Surely this person is not hard to please as they don’t have requests on their profile.
It is, indeed, about communication and connection. And, in my opinion, it’s also a lot about empathy, which the world needs a lot more of these days.
It’s very possible the person is making an effort to expand their horizons by joining a website in a language they don’t understand well. That’s something I would probably think many times before doing it myself, for fear of embarrassing myself.
They will probably manage to translate what you wrote, so I see it as a good opportunity to show a young student that the world has many friendly and welcoming people.
Having said all this, I hope this topic doesn’t turn into a complaint corner about other people. Let’s try to keep the discussion productive or at least constructive, or else I don’t see the point of keeping this open. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to improve things?
If you had asked in the forum, I’m sure someone could have helped you to translate a little message into the recipient’s language. I’m offering my help for the future. Feel free to ask for translations into German, French or Italian.
I like this idea. Could we maybe have a thread somewhere here where members can offer card writing translations? Google translate is such a poor tool sometimes and this would give a great chance to communicate more.
I think, these people disappear after a short time, for they will not be satisfied with this non-communication. But you are now the unlucky one, who should try to please this person without knowing anything about her.
I suggest you send her a nice view card of your area and write a few short sentences about the card and then let it go.
As someone who teaches beginning English to adult immigrants, I often end up needing to communicate with people when we don’t have much shared language. It’s still nice to say hello, even when it’s frustrating that you can’t say a lot to each other.
I find that people beginning to learn a language are most likely to understand short sentences about basic daily topics. “I have two children,” or “I like to cook,” or “the weather is cold here,” or “I live with my mother.” Also, short direct sentences are likelier to make it through Google translate in one piece. The more clauses you have, the more problems you have.
Thank you so much for this, @paulo I invited a student who doesn’t speak English fluently (yet), and have thought of showing Postcrossing to others, but I need to feel confident that people will show them empathy and make them feel welcome if they receive a card telling them they did something wrong, they’ll never send a postcard again.
To me,sometimes one really just wants to vent, and there is nothing wrong with that (as long, of course, as whomever you are venting about cannot be identified)! And there are definitely some roll-your-eyes hard-to-please profiles on the Official site.
I agree that some posts in the thread seem to create problems where none exist – and I think that your answer in this case was spot on. But that also happened in the old Forum, and sometimes it also got a bit “flame-y” although because fewer people participated, it was shut down sooner I think.
If I remember correctly, in the old Forum if someone started complaining about someone undeservedly or if a conversation got too personal it would be reported and the post(s) would be removed. Discourse also allows us to flag things if we think they are out of line. Maybe people should take more advantage of this.
I don’t know how much of a burden it would be, though, because of the increase in New-Forum activity.
Another solution could be…if you are complaining about a “picky” profile, make a concrete suggestion about how to improve it! For example “If they would remove the huge “no” list at the end, I would be really happy to send something from their wishlist.”
We definitely understand that people need a place to vent sometimes, and picky profiles are a problem in Postcrossing… but I think what Paulo was getting at is that we would prefer to put the community’s energy to good use finding ways to fix this issue instead.
So… does anyone have ideas of how to gently push these profiles in a good direction? How can we help people understand that Postcrossing is more about connecting than collecting?
Over the years, we’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about this, and even implemented some ideas, some more successfully than others. I’ll run you through some of them.
Profile moderation - This is basically a revision mechanism, that emails people about a problem with their profile and prompts us to review the profile when it changes. We use it on the more extreme cases, but it’s too one-on-one and thus not enough to move the tide or make a dent.
Automatic warnings - Some words on profile texts trigger an automatic warning on the Settings page, reminding people to not be demanding on their profile (things like “I only want to receive…)”. Although automatic triggers and filters are not perfect, we’ve measured a decrease in profiles with this kind of language, so that seems to have had some success. Naturally, it’s not the kind of solution that fits all the cases, and we sometimes stumble on nice profiles that trigger the warning accidentally.
Detailing - One possible approach would be to go the Couchsurfing way, and break down the profile into different fields: “about me”, “hobbies”, “philosophy”, “one amazing thing I’ve done”, etc. and include one textbox for “postcard interests”. We find the solution clunky though and not very conducive to creativity. Besides, how does one convert the existing profiles into this solution? And how would be prevent that only the “postcard interests” field would be filled and the others skipped, making this solution useless?
Profile ratings - The most complicated solution would be a hidden rating system, a sort of gamification mechanism for profiles. Implementing it would be complicated and we don’t like the idea of ratings very much, and we’ve stayed away from them since the beginning… but in practice we know how powerful numbers are. Tell someone their profile is a 6 out of 10, and you will see things moving upwards almost instantly, as people always want more/better — especially if there are incentives to a higher number.
As I’m sure you can imagine, there are a million tricky parts to this approach. What questions does one ask to make sure the answers we receive match our expectations of a “good” profile, while still letting people be creative? How do we make sure the replies are unbiased? If we don’t let someone review a profile they’ve exchanged a postcard with (to prevent the good or bad interaction from tainting the review), what incentives do people have to review random profiles? How can we prevent this from turning into a “revenge system”? And should there be penalties or rewards for profiles according to their ratings? …
Anyway, we haven’t found good solutions to all these questions, and this last idea definitely feels like overkill… but on the other hand, sometimes that’s what it takes for the tide to turn.
These are just some ideas though — we’re open to others and we’d love to hear your thoughts! If you’re part of other communities or platforms with an automated system that works towards a certain goal, tell us about it!
I think in the end we have to live with a few picky profiles and they are not really a problem if one has a lot of slots like e. g. me, but they are a problem if you are quite new and have just 5 or 6 slots and wait desperately for a free slot to write a card, for in this case it is really a torment if you are afraid you have to wait 60 days for you cannot fulfil one of the wishes.
In these cases, I think, it only helps to ask the suppost to check the profile of the addressee - what you called profile moderation - and to vent a bit in this forum, not in a way that the addressee feels accused
I think the problem is what people consider picky; everybody has a different definition. Some people think that anyone who lists some wishes of themes they really enjoy are picky. I personally don’t. I love knowing that something I have chosen will be loved by the receiver, so I enjoy when someone lists themes they like. Having such a wish list doesn’t make it a demand. I also make the effort to write nice, personal messages because connecting with others is great! I’ve made some great friends through Postcrossing.
If profiles were being policed in such a way where we couldn’t mention any wishes at all, then my opinion is that you would lose members. Maybe not, but I would no longer participate if others were rating my profile or if I was told I wasn’t allowed to mention that I love x, y, z cards, but don’t wish to receive religious cards, for example.
It’s honestly disheartening reading through this thread and seeing what small things trigger some members. To me, the truly picky profiles are so rare that it seems overboard to go to such great lengths to police them. Any time there has been an actual problematic profile, a simple report to the admins clears everything up (and within a timely manner, in my experience).
Perhaps not a popular opinion, but it seems to me that some of the pickiness actually comes from the side of the sender and their interpretation of someone else’s profile.
Now you judge senders for their complaints about profiles that you do not know.
There are really picky and demanding profiles. I have come across a few of them. Yes, they are very few, but they are really annoying, particularly if you are a beginner with just 5 or 6 slots and you want to please everybody as good as possible for you are not sure if they otherwise “forget” to register your card and you have to wait 60 days to get the slot free again.
I invited a student who doesn’t speak English fluently (yet), and have thought of showing Postcrossing to others, but I need to feel confident that people will show them empathy and make them feel welcome 
if they receive a card telling them they did something wrong, they’ll never send a postcard again.