Exasperated! I requested 5 addresses to send postcards to today - I got 3 for China & 1 for Russia. The likelihood is that I shall have to wait 60 days plus for them to be registered, or else they won’t arrive at all. Considering the cost of postage it does sometimes seem a waste of money that I can ill-afford.I guess I’ll just have to be patient.
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Well, almost every single active Chinese member has a gap, most of they have waited for too many days. A friend of mine has never stopped sending during this 10 months, now she sent 400 more than received. You can imagine more cards than usual (I mean even before June 2022) gonna come here. Although I think it SHOULD be, if you don’t want, it’s a good time to quit, till we got balanced. 
I don’t think it will cost too long.
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With over 300 cards sent you should have 14 slots. Yes these 5 may take some time, but you will be sending and receiving the other 9. Depending on the timing this should be approximately 8 or 9 cards in your mailbox every 2 weeks. As you approach 350 you will get yet another slot.
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I’ve seen gaps of 100 or so, but 400? I thought the algorithm was designed to stop giving out addresses at some point?
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You’re right, she has more than 1 account and run them well, and of course was stopped requesting addresses by system for several times. She has told me actually the number is 450, I jokingly said members like she deserve a prize of persistence. 
I am literally unable to do so. If it seems unreal, there was a post shows a gap of almost 300. I do think it’s time to give them a full mailbox. 
Edit: It’s not my original purpose to promote or glorify multiple accounts, and we are not talking about this here. What I focus on is the continues sending, no matter if she gets cards back in time or not.
I’d like to remind everyone that this is not a topic about politics — it’s about the hiccups on mail traveling to China. Let’s keep the conversation on topic.
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I turned off domestic sending, turned on repeated countries, and drew Chinese addresses for all the slots I had free! Even if that’s just 3 right now, I’m ready to help make up those cards postcrossers in China have been waiting so patiently for. 
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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?
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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.
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Thank you for the clarification! And thank you and the team for all your hard work on this very tricky issue!
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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?
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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.
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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?
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@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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
This may shed light on the previous suspension in hindsight and on how to deal with extended periods of mail delivery disruption in the future.
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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! 
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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.
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