That makes me a bit worried now - I am about to go to a rare country, and now I am worried about drawing too many addresses with high chances of the cards expiring/never arriving or arriving and not being registered.
Do we know if the numbers are limited either by person drawing the addresses (maybe not, if you got six addresses to the same country this morning), or by outgoing country?
There are no limits like that. Postcrossing’s algorithm will always try to give as much diversity as it can… but if we have a lot of members in a country that are due a lot of postcards, it’s likely everyone will receive more addresses in that country, until things balance out.
Thank you for the clarification! And thank you and the team for all your hard work on this very tricky issue!
I’m not sure but I’m very concerned considering 8 out of all 10 of my postcards are all traveling to China and the other 2 here in the states . What causes a certain country to be given so much ?
Just curious, how many and what is the percentage of those postcards that were sent to China before the suspension, say, during May 2022, but didn’t get registered within a year and ended up being wiped out from the system?
I don’t know how it works.
I think it is tough for recipients in China when their addresses were paused due to China Post not being able to deliver cards.
At the same time, it is tough for senders who send their cards which are never received or never registered. It is a real cost in terms of money, and time (slots are taken for 60 days, waiting for expiry, to send a new card.)
Maybe it is not possible to please both sides of the equation as long as China Post has its delivery difficulties - hard for both senders and recipients. Hopefully a balance can be found between the two.
Am I the only one who got 5 addresses for China today ?
1 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. Also 2 addresses were identical with the same name . I’m so upset, it takes ages for the cards to arrive so it’ll mean i won’t get as many cards as usual…
anyone else relate?
@Amccane18 You probably ticked “repeated countries”.
@teti The chinese users have a large deficit of cards received and this needs to be fairly refilled.
I just drew addresses:
10x without repeated countries and only got 3x China
10x with r.c. and got 8x China
All of these chinese users have 100 to over 400 sent more than received and I am really happy that I can help them to finally receive cards from all over the world again.
Just a bit statistics from my RR:
Jan, 2023: 20 sent to CN, recd already 16 of them
Febr. 15/16
March 14/20
So you can see that a large percentage of the cards arrive in a relatively normal time.
Thanks Bille. It’s good to see that, in general, a postcard travelling to China has a good chance of arriving successfully. Of course, I know this partially depends on the efficiency of the postal service in the sender’s country, as has been mentioned above. I haven’t sent many to China, but these are the ones I have sent in the last year. And the three most recent of these were registered in China before they expired, which I find encouraging.
I also have some travelling, at 18, 6 and 0 days. I fully expect these to arrive and be registered.
Since China is not in Lockdown anymore I experience cards to arrive much qicker than before. Lets just all wait and see how it goes. For me more cards within Europe or to the US expire than to China. There are always members losing interest in this hobby and do not log in anymore. This might happen more often now that that many cards go into the same country. But we should not blame honest postcrosser from that country who love this hobby!
I wonder what the curves would look like. Let’s say we focus on the batch of postcards sent in April 2022 to China and Germany, respectively, and we track the registration rate over the course of one year. Perhaps it could look like the schematic graph below. On May 1, 2022, a substantial portion of the postcards had already arrived in Germany, hence the starting point of 25%, and within weeks, the cumulative registration rate approaches 100%. For China, the registration percentage adds up slowly and only hovers around 70% at the end of the one-year period.
I have to admit I am concerned about the sudden jump in cards to China. I requested 12 addresses this morning and five were to China. I already have two traveling to China and an additional card to China just expired. I hope this isn’t going to be a huge batch of lost cards. As a US user, I already lost out on all the money for postage and cards sent to Belarus and Russia, which dropped off the system or are about to. I can’t help being nervous. Here’s hoping they arrive! 
I have repeated countries on and I just used all of my remaining slots to send cards to China. I hope they travel fast and make receivers happy. I am so glad the mail situation has improved.
I have repeated countries on and plan to leave it on so I expect I’ll get a lot of China in the upcoming days and weeks. I must admit I’d enjoyed the faster travel times as I was getting mostly US and Germany, but I will be happy to do my part to get this imbalance corrected as soon as possible. I encourage everyone to do the same, I assume the more people pull from the Chinese address backlog, the faster the backlog will clear and the sooner we’ll all be able to return to normal.
A backlog wrt to China was to be expected, so let’s work on it 
. All the postcrossers there have been waiting long to be included in the PC community again. Welcome back 
and let’s write 
.
I am currently taking a break from sending mails for personal reasons, but reading this thread makes me want to pull addresses instead. So, today I decided to pull a few addresses with repeated countries on. I find myself looking forward sending to China again. 
Last time I sent some cards yesterday and 2 out of my 5 addresses are going to china! I might have to do what others are doing and turn on the repeat countries and help these people out once I have some more open address slots!
The last few posts on this topic make me happy. Like you, I also have the repeated countries switched on, and got a bunch of addresses to send to China. I’m glad I can do my bit to help brighten those mailboxes that have been waiting for postcards for so long! 
I feel so excited that the mail to China return to normal. As a Chinese user, for both receiving and sending, the rate is relatively fast. What makes me moved most is how many Postcrossers are willing to check the ‘repeated countries’ to eliminate the imbalance and help Chinese users get back to track.
Postcrossing is such a nice platform to link the world. Thanks to all.
Many years ago we had a similar situation with lots of cards needing to go to Russia, but some members were disappointed drawing those addresses. I sent as many as I could to help relieve the imbalance. I’ll do this again as I have 23 open slots…I’m in no hurry and will still be here long after those cards reach their destinations in 30-60 days.
If Paulo added a box asking “would you be willing to draw only addresses to China to help?” I would say yes
