I support your suggestion, but we Germans are not guilty of other countries having expensive, slow and/or bad postal services and I think that is what keeps many people from doing Postcrossing. And if there were more active Postcrossers in other countries then we all would have a greater variety of countries, cultures and people in sending and getting cards.
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Postcrossing is based and works obviously with postal services and on international worldwide exchanges.
So IMHO the efficiency of postal service should never be an argument of a decision or whatever rules in Postcrossing usage and best practices.
There is even a hashtag for that on some social networks : #slowmail
As a logical consequence their number of slots raises slowlier and the engaged slots take longer to become free again for mail abroad takes much longer than within Germany. A postcard within Germany is usually delivered the day after collection.
Apologies if I misinterpreted your suggestion. It would be very difficult to establish a single minimum distance upon which the whole community agrees, simply because country sizes vary enormously. 
A buffer zone of, say, 500mi/800km would wipe out entire countries in Europe, but would put me squarely in the middle of…the next state below me. 
Edited to add: I completely understand why you would want a buffer zone of x or y number of kilometers; it would probably be best to suggest a feature like that in addition to the “do not send to my own country” option.
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That’s why my sample about Luxembourg and the very close three different countries.
The option
‘Not in my neighborhood’ could be linked to a variable distance eg. choosen by the postcrosser.
Again this distance is already calculated by Postcrossing when sorting postal address destination.
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Where is the privacy if this option “protects” me from getting mail from German places hundreds of km away, but not from places 10 km away, just because they are in Belgium or the Netherlands?
If privacy is the reason for this option then the option should refer to a distance not to a country, for other countries can be very close by.
In Germany a P. O. box costs about 15 Euro per year, a fracture of what we Postcrossers pay for cards and postage per year.
Edit: The rent for a P. O. box in Germany is exactly 22.90 Euro per year.
Please read my posting carefully, then you will certainly get my point!
By the way, I always thought that Postcrossing would not give an address based on distance, not the same city. So you don’t send/receive on a radius of X kilometres. Regardless of the city or even country.
I have “same country” ticked. I’m in Singapore 
I don’t think it’s possible to send/receive from same country, too small!
When I lived in the UK I only got the UK 3 times, two of which in travel mode. If you’re not in Germany/Russia/USA that option makes very little difference.
Though I did get an address of someone in a place I regularly passed by on my train journeys, I was surprised to get someone so relatively near.
I have to say that yesterday I saw a profile of someone in Germany who in about a year/100 or so cards had received twice from Singapore already! I immediately thought they don’t do “own country” so everything they would receive from Germany is replaced by more exotic places. But looking at their sent, they do send to Germany so it’s really just randomness (or they have “same country” on and off for variety).
While of course we all enjoy variety, the reasons for things being as they are now are reasonable. To me it is not a big problem, of course I’d be happy to interact with an exotic place but people are all different and cards are all different even if from Germany or USA or Russia.
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People may have legitimate safety reasons not to want people in their country to receive their name and address. I know Luxembourg is a peaceful and lawful country, but not all countries are. And even in lawful countries, there are victims of abuse, harassment, etc who do not fear anyone in Russia or China or Germany, but might fear someone in their same country, and might not want them or someone they know to randomly get their address, if they happen to be in Postcrossing too.
You don’t need to understand people in those circumstances. You just need to know that the option is there because some people actually need it. That’s all.
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I get it’s not the case for the majority of people, but in mine if this were to be mandatory it would be tricky. I don’t know the reason, but lately the cards I send within Brazil just don’t get to their destination - last year I sent a couple cards to different states here and even one letter with return address to a city nearby and they haven’t arrived yet (by now I’ve accepted they’re lost). I joke with a friend about how curious it is that I send a card to far away Japan and it does arrive, but the ones I send to the next city don’t.
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I think that having ‘repeated country’ option active is enough to help disbalance of postcrossing overall for any user of big-three. That option is pushed mandatory already: even if you ticked it off, the countries might repeat.
If it’s time to remove any option, it’s that one
I sent 95% of my cards to USA and Germany, and I love it! All users are nice and unique, post travels fast. Also when I tried ‘my country’ option couple years ago, then it was disbalanced a bit (90% cards went to Russia, so I sent mostly domestically, received worldwide, great to save money). But trying the option again last year - I got 1 out of 30 address to Russia, so it would not help much.
Also considering reasons mentioned above - privacy, desire to learn about other countries, write in English etc. (I am a bit scared imagining all German users would be sending to Germany too with their post being super fast, big-three will turn to big-one xD) And that Russian postcrossers who want to receive from their own country usually use other sites (social networks or a separate site for Russian-speaking people)
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Yes, it would be nice to have a P.O. box, but even if I had the money, we can’t have these in Finland.
I would love the idea for example once or twice a week having a trip to my mail box, only fun mail, like Postcrossing postcards would be there. (Edit. meaning, the solution for safety, can’t be the P. O. box for everyone.)
But, I don’t like the idea of getting cards from my own country through Postcrossing. I do get them from other people in Finland already.
And of course it makes me feel a little bit safer knowing the stalker in another city won’t get my address this way, when I choose not to send within my country.
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Definitely this. I’m part of a minority group and considering all the violence against minorities in the US (and not just recently–it’s always been there) and with the existence of more conservative US Postcrossers, I am not comfortable with people within the same country sending postcards to me unless I know them well.
On the other hand, I am happy to receive and send many cards to other countries like Germany and Russia. As others have noted above, this is about sending to individual people and not countries. I don’t see how I’m unnecessarily imposing on smaller countries if I’m already sending and receiving mostly from the other larger countries (just not my own).
If this is just about trying to send and receive postcards from countries that aren’t the common countries, the easiest solution is to stop requesting official Postcrossing cards and look more closely at the other parts of the forum where you can do exchanges with other members who may be from less common countries.
If this is just about your stats and wanting to reach some sort of goal to have all the countries represented by those stats, then you’ll have to take that up with the admins about changing their algorithm.
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So lets see how that would work…
Germans are very active as well as Russians and Americans. There are many people from these countries on Postcrossing and they would send to each other a lot. In consequence their cards would get registered a lot faster so their addresses get back in the system to give out.
Now people from smaller countries will not get their own country that much as not many addresses from that country are available and send even more to the top three countries as their addresses are getting back more often.
So with that I do not see how things will improve. Is it not actually a good thing that cards to those countries travel longer so their addresses won’t be given out so much?
BTW I send to my own country and have the repeated countries option ticked. About 70-80% of my cards travel to Germany allowing me to draw at least 10 new addresses each day. Again with usually at least 7 that will go to Germany again.
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Yes definitely.I’m feeling safer by not accepting postcards from my own country.
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This was the initial argument of my thread here about the biggest communities and ‘Not my own country’ (even if I didn’t named any country).
But I disagree with your presentation : in fact the option ‘Not my own country’ makes real differences for postcrosser not being in these three biggest communities (and their members using Not my pown country) but being in small communities.
Not on their own country of course but on their relation with theses biggest countries.
Why ? Because these small communities postcrossers will see their to/from biggest communties increased by the fact they have to serve/receive postcards for the member of the biggest communities refusing to/from postcards in their own country ‘Now my own country’
The relation between small and huge communities are already asymetric.
And that’s normal of course, I accept and respect that.
But the use of ‘Not my own country’ within biggest communities increase concretrely this asymetric relation in defavor of the smallest communities.
Here I’m not conducting a flame anti biggest communities, that’s certainly not my intention.
Simply IMHO I consider this additional increase of defavor is abnormal : small communities members also appreciate the increase the variation of other countries in their to/from postcards relations.
Which again was the initial argument of my forum thread here, and again without any flame against huge communities.
Bruno
As I get the impression that there will be no new points to be added to this discussion and quite a number of agreements and disagreements have been exchanged, I decided to close this discussion in 1 hour.
Please send a PM if you’d like me to re-open it.
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