Same person, different profile or two different people?

Postcrossing General Topics
1

While I know it’s possible for one person to have multiple accounts with different usernames this one is really puzzling me.

I recently received a card which I couldn’t register as the ID number was wrong. Admin have tracked it down for me and I’ve registered it but it seems to have been sent by someone different from who I thought it was.

Although the real names are the same the two profiles are vastly different - usernames, birth dates, family details, likes and wish list, number of cards sent/received etc. are all different. The first profile has no cards listed since early 2019, the second profile has cards listed from May 2020. Both profiles are from the same country.

So are these two different Postcrossers who coincidentally live in the same country and have the same first name or one Postcrosser with different profiles? There’s no problem here, I’m just a bit puzzled and curious :slight_smile:

2

If it’s a common name, or a big country (or both), it’s very possible for two completely different people with the same name to be Postcrossers.

For a while in the beginning I was convinced every Russian Postcrosser in Moscow was named Olga. :smiley:

And for fun, have you heard of the Josh fight? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_fight

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3

Please excuse me if I misunderstand something here.
But I somehow don’t follow your chain of thought.
Why should there not be 2 or more postcrossers with the same first name in a country?
That’s nothing special and it would never occur to me that two people with the same first name could possibly be just one person.

Please explain what I don’t understand.

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4

I hadn’t heard of it but it sounds good fun, and for a worthy cause too. Coincidentally, one of the first names I drew when I came back to Postcrossing was a guy in your country with the name ‘Josh’, and a young guy where I work is actually called Josh :smiley:

5

Sorry, maybe it’s just my way of thinking.

In trying to register the card I put the person’s name and country into search and it gave me a username and profile, but when I registered the card with the ID supplied by admin it was a completely different username and profile although the same first name and country.

Of course I understand that there could be two or even more Postcrossers with the same first name in the same country but after reading the first profile I was expecting to see the same username and profile when I registered the card so I was surprised that it was different.

As I said before, there’s no problem, I guess it’s all just one of life’s coincidences :smile:

6

Maybe there is a possibility that it is one and the same person after all. Maybe this person forgot the login details of the 1st account and then started a 2nd account under the same name … The only way to find out is to message both… :blush:

7

That happened to me too, as I tried to look for “Sabine in Berlin” (not the real case), I got profiles with that same name, in same city, but when I got the id, the person was none of these :grinning:
It’s just common names, big cities, or not even that.

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8

A few months ago the same thing happened to me and it turned out that the admins made a mistake and matched me with the wrong person. Maybe that’s what happened to you too now…

9

Now that would be funny. Maybe there’s a Postcrosser out there wondering why, in my ‘thank you’ message, I’m hoping her new kittens bring her lots of joy :grin:

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