It’s been over 10 months since we temporarily suspended this route, and 7,5 months when we tentatively started to slowly resume it again. And, today, I’m happy to report that we have finally dropped the throttling we had in place for addresses in China.
Average travel times are now close to what they used to be before early 2022. Over the last weeks, we have been further increasing the selection rate of addresses in China and today we are dropping the throttling altogether.
I think some may be curious to see how things are looking at the moment, so here’s the updated chart:
As usual, data is per week: red is average travel times and blue is number of postcards registered each week. Click for bigger. These previous disclaimers still apply to the chart:
One additional note on that spike close to the end of the red line: in the week before the last a significant bunch of postcards with very long travel times were delivered (15% of them were traveling for over 9 months!), bumping up the average travel times. However, last week the average went back to under 55 days and the median (not the mean) travel times actually hasn’t changed much over the last weeks, so the situation remains good as that single week appears to have been an exception.
Obviously, there are still many due postcards which we expect will start their jorneys over the coming days and weeks. As usual, the address selection algorithm will aim to avoid country repetitions where possible, but it should still be expected that addresses in China will be more frequent than over the past months when throttling was in place: please be patient with that and try to keep in mind that many of those receivers have been waiting many months to receive their due postcards back without any fault of their own.
To our members in China who had to go through this long wait: thank you for your patience. I honestly hope we don’t have to go through this again (with addresses in China or anywhere) as it’s not fun for anyone. We did the best we could while having incomplete information and not knowing if the problem was going to solve itself tomorrow, or continue compounding to something much bigger. Looking back, I think it was the right decision. Now that even China Post says things are back to normal, I’m happy that all due postcards will be heading to those that have been waiting for them to arrive. Keep an eye on your mailbox!