But what if they didn’t register them because they never received them? Someone moving is a different situation because the person chooses the option of automatic registration. I just think it would be very confusing for the person, althought this whole situation of disappearing from postcrossing isn’t very common I believe.
One thing that comes to my mind is the situation in China. Postcard are delayed for many months and if someone doesn’t feel like sending with the prospect of receiving only in far future, they may not log in for months because they don’t receive the postcards that are on the way to them. So they would get automatically registered. Can you imagine the unjust feelings it would stir if those people would find cards registered as received by them? Have you seen the amount of hate caused by Postcrossing stop giving out Chinese addresses? (although it doesn’t in fact affect the Chinese users because they wouldn’t be receiving anything because all the postcard from abroad are stuck in overflowing post offices in China) Now imagine all the postcards they haven’t received yet all get registered. If I was in that situation, I would consider the decision to stop giving out my address to be very reasonable but if the cards got registered, I would be mad. It looks very, very bad.
All I want to say is that I think the situation we are talking about is quite rare but the impact of the change may be bigger than expected. So I think it is important to consider also the edge cases and whether it couldn’t cause more harm than good.