I was looking at statistics on site and there was suddenly a question in my head. The IDs I’m currently getting for my sent cards are about GR- 77000, But when I look into stats, Greece has less than 72000 cards sent. Does this mean about 5000 are expired or traveling? (I’m guessing only a handful are actually traveling, 95% or more must be expired) Maybe a small percentage is also IDs drawn and never written/sent…
Is there any other reason for this imbalance? I know that sent cards for each country are calculated according to the cards that have actually reached their destination and been registered.
Also, this inconsistency must be all over, not just Greece, since it mostly has to do with the recipient rather than the sender.
An interesting question! My last ID number is 374130. From my small, moderately rare country there are received 341927 cards. Lost 32203 cards???
I don’t believe.
Let’s see if others have any more thoughts on this… it sounds weird but “lost” might mean never registered, living in a corner of the post service, or have never left the sender’s home…
Some of these are still traveling, some were lost and some were never sent. Every country has an imbalance like this, and with the most active countries, the difference gets much bigger (in Germany it’s over 500’000).
I know I’ve read about this somewhere in the forum, but I can’t seem to find it anymore. The answer people gave then was that this imbalance is due to lost cards, never sent cards and never registered cards (although this last would be very few).
I think lots of people have had at least one card that expired for good (a year), multiply that by all users in a country, it’ll be an expressive number. And there’re a few cards that are never sent, again, multiply that by the users in a country and you get many cards. Those are the only situation I can imagine. And there’re the traveling ones too, as mentioned above.
As far as I understand it, the number of “sent” postcards only counts those postcards which have been registered. So the difference between the number of sent cards and the latest ID is partly because there are a bunch of postcards travelling at the moment. Of course, some are lost, but probably the majority are just travelling and will be registered.
The “sent postcards” in the country page is not a number “up on time” - it is not live. Means, if there is registered a postcard this number doesn’t change.
