The only place I have been able to find a list of expired cards is in the “Latest Traveling Cards” link on the home page. But this is a rolling list; it only shows cars which have expired (gone past the 60 day registration limit) in the last year. Once they go past a year, they come off the list. If I go to the “stats” page from my profile page, this only shows sent and received cards, where sent means cards that I sent that actually got registered.
Is there no place that I can see all of the cards that I have actually sent (including those that have never gotten registered)?
Once a card has been travelling for over a year, the information about it is deleted, since it’s so unlikely to arrive. If it’s important to you for your own reasons, maybe maintaining a spreadsheet of the postcards you send would be helpful? That helps keep it organised so you don’t have to go back looking for the emails, for example, and you’d just have to enter each ID as you request it, and then you’d always have the info available. Also makes it easy to attach other details to that for later interest, e.g. how much postage cost at the time, or which postcard you used, etc.
@shanaqui - Useful suggestions all, but more of an end-user administrative burden than I’d hoped for, especially given that much of the data is already available on the server.
@yudi - No doubt. I recognize that all data for expired cards is deleted at the one year point to save server space, and I understand the economics of that. But I’m not really suggesting that data should be retained. What I had in mind was more like this:
Postcrosser X establishes an account and starts to send cards. The data is managed the way it always has been, cards expire at 60 days, and if unregistered, are deleted at 365 days. But some additional coding is added to Postcrosser X’s account (all accounts actually). This additional coding tracks the total number of addresses postcrosser X has requested vs. the total number of cards they sent that have been registered. Then the monthly and yearly stats reports include that data. Lots of ways to break it down further, (by country or month for example) but that isn’t really what was looking for, and isn’t really useful (at least to me). I was just hoping to leverage the data on the site to be able to see that I have drawn (as an example) 100 addresses and 98 or 87 or 72 of them have been registered before they expired (60 days) or before they were deleted from the system (365 days). I think that there is a bit of capital investment on the part of the site to get that coded, but the additional data burden is very low.
I also recognize that there are likely many coding priorities for the site, and this could very well be low on the list, unless a lot of people want it.
Put another way, I was just looking to get a sense of what percentage of my sent cards actually are received, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to track that.
The reason this question came up was that my partner was looking over my shoulder when I reviewed the blog about postcrossing’s annual statistics, and she was surprised that they did not track what percentage of sent cards overall actually make it through. She was also understandably curious (as postal rates here go up tomorrow) as to how much of what I am spending on this hobby goes to waste. I get that this is a volunteer organization run on donations and shoestring budget. Just saying that there are economic concerns on the part of the end user that are just as valid.
I’m keeping an excel table of my expired cards.
If a card arrives later than after 60 days, I remove it from the table.
Sometimes, when a card didn’t arrive, I send a 2nd card. If I do this, I write it into the table. Also, if 2nd card arrives (mostly they do). Some times 2nd card arrives, and weeks after this 1st card arrives (nobody would have thought it would).
I also note what happened with the card after expiring (sent 2nd card - expired final (more than 360 days) - registered by postcrossing (in some cases this happens, e.g. when the account of the repicient is getting closed and there still are traveling cards)
It’s just my private interest, nothing more.
I’ve been doing postcrossing for a bit more than tree years now. Because of my list I can figure out tendencies. For me the most important one is: The percentage share of not registered postcards has increased, especially for cards to Russia.
2019/20 my percentage of (finally) expired cards was about 3%, now it’s approaching the 5% mark.
Well, of course this will be very interesting for one or the other, but not for the vast majority of users.
And if you consider that not every drawn address actually means a sent postcard or not every unregistered card would mean a lost postcard, i.e. you would very likely have a totally falsified statistic, it would make more sense if everyone would do something like this for themselves.
I do very much the same thing: I have a spreadsheet that lists all of the same information with the addition of a ‘deleted’ column. Much like you, this sheet allows me to keep track of my expired cards. For example, I was able to check the sheet and see that I needed to send a message and a second card to someone in the US who hadn’t received their card.
The important point for me is that, while I’ve had 5-7% expired cards a year, I’ve had 0 Deleted cards. That is the most important measure for me - I have successfully made the connection, which I see as my goal in being a member of Postcrossing.
That’s right, I totally agree. I did have some “Deleted Cards” - up to now five in a bit more than three years. Most of them were because I didn’t send a 2nd card. I always ask after 60 days politely if the card arrived and had been overseen - and if the repicient would like me to send a 2nd card. I do this just to be sure the recipient is still interested. Sometimes I didn’t get an answer, and so I didn’t send a 2nd card.
Some time ago I got a card that had travelled for more than one year, so I could not register it, but PC offered me a link to pm the sender, so the information about the sender was not deleted.
Indeed; I work for Postcrossing and could do that – if I knew the ID of the card in question. In fact, if a card has been travelling for more than one year, you can do this for yourself now by trying to register it; even though you can’t register it, the system will tell you the username of the sender, if they still use Postcrossing, so you can send them a message.
But even for me, when viewing someone’s sent postcards I can’t view anything older than a year. I can still look up a specific ID, but it’s no longer listed against the member’s account.
