Three weeks is an extremely short time. For some countries, that’s the bare minimum. Even for fast ones, sometimes things take longer. Or maybe the person is taking some time to register, which is not great but still not a huge amount of time. Not logging in for 3 weeks is not so weird if the person has nothing to register, and if life is busy.
You don’t have to message people about this, at all. You can if you want but I personally think it’s a waste of time. And if you decide to do it, I would wait 2-3 months minimum. I’m sure there’s a lot on this topic in the rest of this thread and others
I have also sent a card to a person in prison. It hasn’t been registered yet, but the person still has access and receives other cards, so it ours might get registered as well
Agreed. I’ve had quite a few times when finances or other circumstances prevented me from being active, but I’ve always come back and I don’t think it would have been fair of PC to delete my account. If I made the choice to, then that is fine.
It is OK to take breaks from Postcrossing (or other activities) whenever needed/wanted. Of course, one should register postcards which are received. But sometimes it might be very difficult to do so; if one is very sick (physically or mentally) for instance. We never know why people are absent, unless they write a note in their profile about it.
I agree that 3 weeks really is a short amount of time. I don’t even begin to think about it until about a month has passed. Then, I go on and see what the average time has been for this user to receive a postcard from my country. On two occasions, I have sent a note at about day 35 just to check and see if the card has been received. It was useless as in both cases, the person didn’t write back. Then, all that’s left to do is wait the 60 days until it expires.
Earlier this year I was given the address of a school to send a card to, one card sent, none received, no profile , not logging in to their account regularly - so I knew I was wasting time and money on writing a card. Imagine my surprise when I did a search on the PXing site and found over 100 seemingly identical accounts, all located in the same small town, all have sent just one card and none have logged in for over a month. A handful have registered one card, the rest nothing.
Just my opinion but I think all of these accounts should be closed and the 100 or so cards which PXers sent in good faith should be auto-registered.
100 seems like a lot. But I could see there being multiple accounts if an entire class or school signed up individually. I don’t think they are supposed to do that though.
Have you let admin know? I had a similar situation, and once it was checked, the postcards were auto registered, and admin got in touch with the teacher concerned to make sure they understood their responsibility to get their pupils to register received cards.
I have not contacted admin as if I did so every time I was given the address of a “ghostcrosser”, it would take up too much of their time. Not to mention that , generally speaking, I just accept this sort of thing happening as being part of Postcrossing. It was just the sheer number of people in this instance that niggled me.
In this case though, it seems like one of those schools that misunderstood the point of postcrossing or that didn’t understand that they need to register postcards. I much prefer it when teachers set up exchanges via the forum so they can make terms that work for everybody…
I am also not actively sending since Febuary since many of my postcard then has been expired. But I keep on log in into the web. Sometimes I look at the cards ppl sent/received and favourite them. Thus it will show in my account last seen (if I am not mistaken, or last log in) just few days/weeks ago. Not months. Were you not active at all, not even opening the web every now and then? And may I know how long were the longest you didnt check the web?
True. I totally understand. But those who took the time and effort and of course money, also need to be appreciated. I would say if an account has been inactive (as in never log in, not inactively sending) maybe say, 6 months? Or even 10 months? Maybe the system should auto register the cards? Idk
Here’s my activity. There’s several slowdowns or complete breaks that, looking back, correspond to : several moves, a suicide attempt, my mother’s death, an unwanted promotion at work, a divorce, a new relationship, and traveling several times. I don’t know exactly how long I went without logging in. May have been checking the site even though I wasn’t sending anything.
I thought after months of no sent cards your address won’t be given to address pool? Especially if you set your account to inactivity (I think postcrossing should set someone’s account automatically to inactivity after maybe 3 months of no activity/logged in) to avoid these profiles’ addresses getting drawn from the pool
Postcrossing does set the account inactive after 30 days of not logging in. It is great people can take longer breaks without the account being closed. I have had a recipient that sent just a few cards and had no activity for a year after that. When the person finally logged in, I got their address (they were due a card) and my card did get registered. Some other times people have been active and stopped logging in after I have sent my card to them. Just looking at when the person has received or sent cards doesn’t really tell the whole story. All that we know for sure is that we do not get the address unless the person has logged in during the past 30 days.
It happens all the time 
