More newbie questions

There is no fixed rule for “liking”.
I use it when I have read the message and agrees with it or when I will reply later because I don’t have time at the moment.

1 Like

I think it’s up to you, do you want to send message that you have sent the card. Myself, I never send those messages and nobody has ever sent me those on the forum. Maybe it has became more popular after people have started swapping on Facebook and Instagram where everybody seems to want to have a proof that cards are sent.

Some tags have rules that tagging back is not allowed, for example the favourites tags. If you read the tag rules and there is no mention about tagging back, you can do it. I don’t considere it rude. :slight_smile:

There is no rule how many times you can tag the same member. Just go for it! I again have some personal manners here, I usually wait until the last card I sent has arrived before tagging someone again. However, sometimes I break this personal rule. :wink:

1 Like

i never do this but that’s because when i tag someone i have time to write the card and send it within 2 days.
sometimes with swaps i say something like ‘i’ll send it out this week’ because i don’t always have time to write the same day. some people send photo’s of the sent cards, some don’t. i usually don’t, i think we should have some trust in people that everyone sends out what they should.

and you can tag how much you want. personally i wouldn’t tag someone for the first time more than once, i like someone to know that my cards will arrive.

basically it’s all up to you.

1 Like

There are tags who allow this, there are tags who don’t. You can read each tags description.

2 Likes

If they are happy with your card, why not? Tag them again.
If you check tags like favorite tags, wishlist tags and offer tags, you will see regular participants who keep tagging each other frequently.

2 Likes

Hi, I hope someone can clarify some details for me. I just got the address of a PostCrosser in a country where the mail service, as well as the internet service, is almost always good and speedy. They have sent 129 more cards than they have received, how can this be?? Checking the statistics, it appears that they “save up” and register huge numbers (sometimes 20 or more) cards all at once. Is this allowed? It seems inconsiderate of the sender, at best. Is there something I am missing here? Are there club guidelines that address this?

They can be inactive for some reason, not able to receive mail, but continue to send, that would explain that difference.

Register huge numbers at a time can be a result of that, if you turn your account into active with many postcards due, your address will go to many postcrossers, meaning you will receive lots of postcards at once.
Or maybe there is another reason, doesn’t mean something is wrong :wink:

2 Likes

So it is OK to wait several months before registering your received post cards?

It’s not OK, but that is probably not what has happened.

The only way to build up this big a difference in sent and received is to change your status to ‘inactive’ on the main site.

If you do so, you can keep sending out cards during this time, and end up owed quite a few when you go active again. Then, you will get a rush of cards all at once.

If you were ‘active’ and sending cards, but not receiving them, the admin team would be in touch to find out why, long before there was this big a difference.

I do this for time to time because Australia is a ‘rare’ country - my address gets given out more frequently, and I end up in the red. So I go inactive to get it back in balance again. I’ve also done it when I was expecting to move house but wasn’t sure when it would happen.

The postcrossing team do a lot of monitoring behind the scenes to make sure people are doing the right thing. They can tell a lot about how people are acting that is not visible from the outside. If they suspect people are (consistently) not registering properly they can take action, but we’ll never know they have done it.

6 Likes

Yes, I too think it’s clear this account has been inactive. (But the person kept sending cards.)
Here you can read about it:

https://www.postcrossing.com/help/how-does-the-inactive-state-work

So you see it’s even recommended to choose inactive status, if you can’t register your cards.

(Postcards should be sent and registered as soon as possible, so it would not be ok to wait that long before registering.)

2 Likes

Thanks, this helps. Apparently this account stays inactive most of the time, as there are only blocks of many received cards, not ever a steady stream. Months between these blocks. Months since any card has been marked received. But if it was set to inactive, why did I get her address? Possibly because she does not actually mark the account inactive while she is away?

Maybe she is now active again after long inactivity :man_shrugging: :woman_shrugging:

2 Likes

Yes, only time will tell. But definitely the track record points to an account that is mostly inactive, whether set that way or not.

I think you can check their travel time. If they registered huge number but travel time of the cards are reasonable, I believe they marked their account as inactive. If they have long long long… :sweat_smile: travel time, maybe you are right that they were inactive but they didn’t set their account inactive.

3 Likes

Hi there. Sorry if someone has asked this. Do people typically send a thank you message when they receive a postcard?

If a postcard you have sent is registered, you will receive an e-mail which looks like this:
(I have blurred out some information)


If the receiver has typed a message to you while registering the card, it will be displayed where the arrow in the picture is pointing to.

You may sometimes also receive an e-mail without any message, but from my experience, you will get a message in 95% of all cases.

3 Likes

Thanks so much! I thought the message would appear here. I just checked my email and found them all!

Sometimes members with a huuuge number of postcards (say, 5,000+) have large gaps like that because they send so much. Especially if they are from Germany, which is very fast, or other equally fast countries. Their cards travel so fast, and they send so many, that it doesn’t quite catch up.

Registering in batches is indeed very annoying for the senders. Sometimes it happens to receive in batches if that’s what the postal service does, especially in these weird times. Or as others said, this person could be going inactive often and then active and get all at once. If it really does look like they hoard postcards and register them all at once just because, then the admins could have a look into it (as others said, travel times would shed a lot more light).

I sent to a member with a really, really odd registration pattern which I could never guess an explanation for, but my card was registered eventually, even if it took a lot longer than average.

What I learnt is, you can never tell. Some people look like they will never register what you send, but they do. Others look super active, and disappear right after you send to them.

2 Likes

If it’s a user with many sent and recieved cards, it may be that a huge amount of cards arrives in just one day.

I have over 2.200 sent and recieved cards, and today I found 11 official cards in my mailbox (after none the days before). So I’m not saving up cards even though it may appear like it on first sight… :wink:

2 Likes

Yes, that happens to me too (usually only 5 or 6 at a time, though, and many days I get only one or two). What I noticed that looked odd about this particular account was that there were NO days with fewer than 10 or so cards registered at a time, only large numbers all at once. Based on the helpful comments here, I believe this person just travels a lot of the time and has their account set inactive frequently, then sends cards when they are home and receives them in batches.