Maybe it’s soon time for an update on the situation? 
@paulo @meiadeleite
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Not sure how up to date this info is, but on the country stats page it shows members in China having sent 2,834,963 and having received 2,690,249…I assume this means that 144,714 cards have not yet been received/registered. If they are all piled up in post offices I wonder how long until they are delivered?
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Since the suspension Chinese Postcrossers have sent in the region of 35000 cards, so this has to be considered in the stats. Somewhere around 25000 “missing” , ie. long travelling/expired cards have been registered since the suspension. No doubt the team is keeping an eye on how many cards should have been registered by now.
One thing for sure, when the suspension is lifted there will be a lot of Chinese addresses being given out.
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As with extra slots which
it appears that something similar has been implemented before. So a variation of that is not totally out of the question. (Quoted by someone else. The original post was deleted though)
As with why World Postcard Day, and even Postcrossing stamp releases, are brought in the discussion here, it is because they are also based on a fair postcard exchange system. The physical backlogs are not handled here. The real problem is users’ frustration and the direct cause of that is the 60-day expiry rule. Now that the suspension is in place, I hope it’s not just wait-and-see but instead a transition period towards revising the rules to better fit the current situation.
Postcrossing is free to use, but at the same time, it is a registered entity in Portugal and also accepts donations, which I assume comes with certain responsibilities too, especially as it gets official endorsement from more and more postal services worldwide through stamp issuance.
Your tone is menacing and accusatory here. What are you accusing Postcrossing of?
Donations are not the same as purchases, and your assumption about responsibilities tied to donations is likely way off the mark. I donate to Postcrossing happily because I think the project is fantastic. I have zero expectations or assumptions with regards to my donation. A donation is not the same as a purchase.
Your veiled accusation is very unfair in my opinion. I fervently hope this is a language issue at play here, and that you are unaware of the weightiness of what you wrote.
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As you wrote, Postcrossing is a free website that is ran by volunteer work of the admins. Donation is something you do because you want to. People donate to Postcrossing because they love this idea and hobby. You cannot ask the admins to do something specific because they get donations from the users.
Also I think the admins clearly know that they must be responsible for the service, and that is why they made this decision. Because they cannot keep lots of people waiting for their postcards to China be registered forever. I understand that Chinese users are deeply disappointed by this, but I don’t think that you can go like “You get donated money, be responsible”… because they are trying their best to be responsible for everyone.
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You’re entitled to your opinion.
One responsibility that I referred to is to give proper priority to the following undertakings.
- Maintain a fair system for postcard exchanges
- Organize World Postcard Day
- Collaborate with postal authorities on official Postcrossing stamps
Another thing I’ve been trying to point out here is the internal cause of Postcrossing backlogs, which I think is the 60-day expiry rule that is being applied uniformly, and at a time when mail delivery to China is unreliable, traps people into waiting forever for their postcard to be registered. What is lacking is flexibility. Given the long waiting times and potential money loss, it seems to me a single 60-day expiry rule no longer works well enough, hence my suggestion for extra slots for postally unreliable destinations (that is, China). It now seems less impossible as it was mentioned that a similar feature had been implemented before.
I wonder if extra slots were provided, how might it work or not work?
Providing extra slots for those who got Chinese address seems inefficient for me, as it won’t be helpful for China Post to solve its backlog. One of the main purposes of this suspension is, in my opinion, to give some time for China Post to improve its backlogs of mails. Giving extra slots might prevent people from waiting until their cards get registered, but it will only result in the increase of mails kept in the post offices in China.
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The kind of extra slots I’m picturing are like this:
- Provided in another category for postally unreliable destinations (basically China)
- Longer expiry period (120 days, 180 days, etc)
- Do not encroach on existing normal slots
- If the card does get registered, it still contributes to one’s sent total
What it means if implemented:
- Senders get to choose whether to take the risk and use an extra slot
- Since this is an extra slot, it’s up to the sender to judge by themselves if mail will be delivered or not
- Recipients can choose whether to receive postcards as usual (by setting their account inactive)
- The system continues to collect official data on mail delivery
I understand official postcards increase China-bound mail load, but I also think the effect is negligible, considering people are still sending mail to China through forum activities, and of course, outside Postcrossing. However, extra slots, or other better alternatives, will make the system fairer.
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Today my first postcard to China arrived after 91 days. 
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I still don’t get how the 60 day expiry matters. In fact, that’s your extra slot, because after the 60 days you get a new slot wether your card arrived or not. So surely a longer period would be more frustrating with slots being occupied that way?
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I’m thinking why would the extra slot need expire date at all? It could be registered within a year.
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and much more complicated I guess…
However, everyone who thinks they know better or can do better than the admins of postcrossing know or do is free to create their own fairer alternative free of charge postcard-exchange-website…
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The internal cause of the backlogs is that the recipient’s address is given out again when a due postcard expires. To clarify,
- Normal category
- Traveling postcards (≤60 days)
- Expired postcards (61–365 days)
- Second category (for postally unreliable destinations. And these are the “extra slots” I meant)
- Traveling postcards (say, ≤120 days)
- Expired postcards (120–365 days)
My question is still if the second category were created, how it might work or not work. I guess some will try out the new feature while others skip it. Regarding the comments above,
- If one feels it’d be frustrating, don’t use the feature.
- If one feels it’s too complicated, don’t use the feature.
How does Postcrossing be endorsed through Postcrossing stamps? They don’t get the money from the sale of the stamps.
Please explain how the extra slots will be created!
If I have 10 slots… than 1% of these are extra = category 2, means I can send 9 cards first category 1 and 1 card second category. Or is it like 10 cards normal way and x cards the other category?
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And if one feels that the Postcrossing system is just beyond their understanding or not meeting with their expectations…one is always free to create their own free, postcard swapping platform…as mentioned above. That rather unpleasant saying just popped into my head…to beat a dead dog…
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The endorsement that I’m talking about is of course not in monetary terms but refers to the legitimacy or status that Postcrossing gets from such official stamp issuance. I assume the postal authorities are lending legitimacy based on the idea of an open and fair plaftform for postcard exchanges. It is still largely so, but this suspension, in my opinion, is casting doubt on it.
I’m thinking of a flat number to begin with, say, 1 or 2 extra slots. Many members have suggested an extra slot on World Postcard Day, but the demand for extra slots (for China) will be far more dispersed.
Postal Monitor may still be applied to the second category, although it monitors airmail. People may choose to send a postcard via surface mail instead, if that option is available. Alternatively, it can just be displayed as an alert.
The bottom line is, as long as not all the postal services outside China have stopped accepting mail to China, I feel there is a need to retain a channel for China-bound postcards on the official platform.
Well, it does not. If surface mail is available the route will not be blocked. But that’s a bit OT here… though many countries do no longer offer surface mail nowadays, so if air mail is not availabe, there are no other options.
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But I still don’t get it. I don’t see the benefit of taking so long to expire. The only benefit of expiring is unblocking a slot, so your slow-country slot will be blocked for longer. So what does it matter?
And as I said a million posts ago, how do you decided which country goes in the slow travelling list? China okay, but then where do you draw the line? And what is mail between Country X and Country Y, Z, J is slloooowww but mail between Country X and all the other countries is not slow?
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It’s been over a month since our last update, so we have been overdue for some news. During this time we have been following the latest data, slicing it in different ways and sometimes squinting our eyes really hard trying to find some hopeful numbers… but sadly, we don’t have any exciting numbers to share.
That said, we have some news and an update about this suspension. But first, some context.
When we decided to place this temporary block, China was going through several large strict lockdowns due to the pandemic, some affecting international mail sorting centers (with some countries stop sending to China due to that), and even some domestic mail routes within China were having trouble. Things were quite bad. Over several weeks, little mail was being delivered and the average travel times were only growing (doubling within just a few months), forming a large backlog of pending mail. Importantly, there was no clear end in sight at that point. So, not knowing when (and if) things would get back to normal is what took us to preventively put this suspension in place. We know this was not welcomed by everyone, but still believe to be the correct decision considering the circumstances.
Since then, and as far as we know, international mail sorting centers on China seem to be working again and mail is being delivered. So we were hoping that delivery of all that delayed mail would have been prioritized, but… it’s not been the case. Backlogged postcards are being delivered, but very very slowly, and travel times have been mostly expanding.
However, — and this is the only upside on all this — mail is still being delivered (again, very slowly!), which is something back in June we couldn’t be sure about amidst all the ongoing strict lockdowns. Some postcards are arriving with 3, 4, even 5 months of delay (and many even later, which is crazy!), but slowly they seem to be arriving to their destinations.
Here’s how things are at the moment:
It’s important to note this about this chart: because we suspended this route on June 15th and there’s no new postcards since then, at this point (and going forward) the average travel times (red line) is expected to go up, and the number of received postcards (blue line) will naturally trend down, unless a significant portion of the backlog is finally delivered. Also, because we’ve suspended this destination almost three months ago, we don’t have new data about mail sent more recently, so our knowledge on how things are progressing is becoming limited.
We don’t know if average travel times of several months is the new normal for mail to China (and we really hope not!). Also, we no longer expect a sudden clearing of the backlog: for whatever reason, backlogged mail is being cleared very very slowly, and we don’t have a good and clear explanation for this. So, what now?
Considering all this, we decided to restore this destination, although with some constraints. We will restart selecting addresses in China again but, for now, we will be throttling the rate at which they will be selected.
The goal with this throttling is to start slowly restoring the route while we continue to measure when those new postcards arrive, and at the same time, not having a huge wave that would suddenly form if we would restore it all at once. Our hope is that the backlogged mail continues to slowly be cleared over the coming months, while these new postcards will, hopefully, start to be delivered within more normal times again, although that is outside of our control.
We don’t think the issue is completely solved though, and we will re-evaluate this over time. All going well, we will increase the rate at which we select addresses in China, with the goal of fully dropping the throttling in a few months.
If, however, travel times continue to expand even further than what we have been seeing over the last months, we’ll need to re-evaluate this once again. Ultimately, to participate in Postcrossing, one needs to be able to send and receive postcards reliably.
Right now we are still completing the work for this throttling process to be possible, and we hope to have it ready in the next couple of days so, soon, you’ll start seeing addresses from China again.
Fingers and toes crossed that the mail gods will be in our favor and these postcards will soon be making many mailboxes happy again.
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