Over the next three months I’ll be out of town for a week three times. I’ll be taking a vacation to Nashville for a week in the middle of October and visiting my parents the week of Thanksgiving and from Christmas Eve to New Years’ Day.
I just now realized it could be nearly a week before a card gets registered.
Is there a rule regarding how long you have to register a card?
I always register the card the day I get them. It might not be the very instant I get home, but before i go to bed at night, I trust the card. (Adding the image to my wall might take a few days if the sender doesn’t include the image when he sent it.)
I figure that the sender wants to get a postcard as soon as possible, and I want don’t want to delay that more than necessary.
But certainly Postcrossing takes into account vacations and illness that might prevent immediately registering the card don’t they?
There is always the “inactive” setting in your profile. You can still send out cards, but your address won’t be given out until you are back to active.
You can find it in Profile → Settings → Account Settings
You’re new enough Dave that you’re not getting a huge amount of postcards at any one time right now, so a week’s delay I wouldn’t worry about a lot - in reality it might be a few days delay only given that you could receive a card on a Wed say & be back by Sat or Sun to register it.
If it’s just for a week, I wouldn’t change my settings to inactive. You would have to do that weeks in advance to be sure no cards arrive in that week. As @LC-Canada wrote, only very few postcards will be affected by a few days delay.
I always go into inactive mode before a week’s holiday. In reality, I find I have to do this a little over two weeks before I leave, to take into account all the cards that are already travelling to me. And I go active again 2-3 days before coming home.
I usually register cards within 24 hours when I’ve received them. Nevertheless, I would not mind to register a few days later if I was absent for just one week. Some cards from far away countries need more than a month anyway, so you’d have to put your account to inactive about four weeks in advance at least. I would not do this because of only a week being absent.
There are some postcrossers who register their cards only once a month. You can see this in their “received” list. Doing this regularly is not very nice, but may be they do not have any opportunity to register more frequently. But just because of one week being absent I would not really mind.
Unless the power is out and my phone is totally dead, I HAVE to register them the day I get them or I’ll misplace them. I misplace everything and I find one thing only when I’m looking for something. The other day when I got stamps in the mail, my dad (we live together) said “did you really use up that stack of stamps you bought last week?” And I said, “No, I didn’t. But they’ll turn up.”
If you’re gone for a week and then register it as soon as you get home, you are registering it as soon as you get it. You didn’t have it until then. Also, you have no idea if that card came the day you left or the day you got back. Don’t worry about it!
A lot of people register cards in batches, either because they don’t or can’t check their mail every day or for a variety of other reasons. So I definitely wouldn’t worry about a week’s delay – many people go significantly longer. But if you are worried about it, then yes, inactive is the way to go.
