I want to quote my message here too:
So it’s not a unique situation, while it’s very-very upsetting 
P.S. And I welcome all Chinese users to my offer, I love sending cards to you (and any other countries, no exceptions)
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Everyone’s enjoying receiving cards here,no matter how slow it is….It’s the meaning of POSTCROSSING…Just imagine if we know the correct time for receiving things,why don’t you choose ups,fed ex??it’s 2022 now!
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I am so used to China’s long delivery time, that I’m very confused now to hear that it’s something really wrong. I’ve always been waiting for packages to Russia for more than two months with rare exceptions. So why incoming mail should work faster there?
Of course, now it’s being even longer due to anticovid measures, but that’s understandable. Can’t we just be more patient and wait for a longer time?
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I’m closing this topic temporarily so we can catch up on the replies, deal with the flags and clear out some inappropriate or off-topic comments here. Will be back shortly!
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There’s been quite a commotion over this in the few hours the topic was up, with several posts being plain inappropriate or just off-topic. We have deleted those posts, while trying to keep the rest of discussion intact.
I’ll try to address the main points brought up and clear some of the confusion we are seeing, but I’ll say upfront that this decision is only going to be reversed on the condition I explained on the first post: that a meaningful amount of the many already traveling postcards start to be delivered again. We will not put this up to a vote.
So, by parts:
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We did not take lightly the decision to temporarily suspend postcards to China. Postcrossing’s mission is to connect the world through postcards, so this is something we very much rather not have to do, specially when it affects such a large part of our community. As said, we have been concerned with this situation for many weeks now. We hoped things would improve, but our data shows that that is not happening. The longer we wait, the bigger the problem becomes (currently at already tens of thousands of postcards) as there’s no clear information on when things will be back to normal.
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As the very first word of the topic title says, this mail route suspension is temporary. Like everyone here, we want this to be as short as possible. We have been clear about when we will restore this route: as soon as we see clear signs that the already traveling postcards are indeed being delivered and the backlog is being cleared, we will restore the route. Again, this is meant to be temporary.
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The decision we took is not only due to slow/delayed mail. There are several countries to where travel times are known to be very long (China being one of them) and we don’t suspend mail routes based on that alone. The main issue here is that the vast majority of mail is not arriving at all and we don’t have clear information when things will be back to normal. Average travel times to China are usually in the 50-60 days range, but the vast majority (~95%) of mail sent 60 days ago has not been delivered yet, which is highly unusual. We noticed this weeks ago and we have been waiting since for mail to start arriving, but the backlog has only been growing and it is starting to affect both members in China and elsewhere (more on this later).
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While suspending all postcards to one of the most active countries in Postcrossing is uncommon, we suspend/restore mail routes around the world on a nearly daily basis, as updates to the Postal Monitor are done frequently as part of our management of the project to keep it working as best as we can. For the most part, our temporary route suspensions are not noticed as the consequence is that things mostly just work as expected.
Even though suspensions in the Postal Monitor are primarily done based on information we collate together from postal operators, some of the suspensions we do are based on Postcrossing’s data when we detect problematic routes where mail simply doesn’t arrive. Unfortunately, many countries don’t publish to which destinations they can’t send mail to, and sometimes even destinations claimed to work, really don’t… When there’s enough evidence of this in our data, we suspend those routes too. All this to say that it is not uncommon that Postcrossing suspends mail routes based on problems we have enough data to reliably detect. -
When we add a suspension based on data we are seeing that is likely to affect a large portion of the community, we may publish something on the forum, a place more suited for publishing updates on a regular basis (see here for an example). We have not made a wider announcement about this suspension yet because it is our hope that mail starts to arrive consistently again soon and this will be reversed. This suspension decision is partially preventive so that the problem doesn’t get even worse, affecting more and more people. If in ~2-3 weeks there’s still no clear signs of improvement, we will likely do a wider announcement.
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We did try to find (geo) alternative solutions to handle this, but as far as we could see, the issue doesn’t seem to be dependent on origin country (although several countries have already suspended mail to China due to the backlog), nor does it seem to be dependent on the destination region in China. Whatever the reasons, this issue is affecting pretty much the whole country.
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Why not just hope for the best and wait for everything to eventually arrive? Because this is already affecting members, both in China and elsewhere. Postcrossing has systems in place to automatically detect and act when accounts have unusually high rates of expired postcards traveling to or from them. With China being a very active country and mail not arriving there, these systems are already affecting hundreds of postcrossers in China (since a large portion of mail sent to them is not reaching them), as well as postcrossers elsewhere, who may be sending a significant portion of their postcards to China. Just waiting for things to sort themselves out implies more and more members will be affected. We have already placed some exceptions to these systems to partially handle this situation in China, but we won’t fully disable them as they are essential in Postcrossing to prevent misuse and minimize expired postcards.
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Some questioned why we aren’t blocking postcards to Ukraine just as well. We did temporarily suspend postcards to Ukraine for some time in the early days of the war to prevent lost mail, and are still blocking postcards to some areas of the country where fighting is actively ongoing.
This is not the right place to go into a lot of detail about this, but while normally we are technically unable to place blocks at a region/city level on the Postal Monitor, we have implemented a custom solution for Ukraine through which we have been preventing postcards from going to some of its regions (Oblasts). We have been doing regular updates to this based in part on information by Ukrposhta, direct feedback from postcrossers in Ukraine which report to us how things are in their area, as well public news sources. This solution is not perfect, but it is the best we can do for the moment to handle a very complicated situation. We also try that postcards only go to members in Ukraine that have been active quite recently to try to account for the many displaced or otherwise affected, so we minimize the postcards going to those who can’t possibly receive them.
As a comparison point, while only 5% of postcards sent to China 60 days ago have been delivered, in the same period almost 60% have been delivered in Ukraine, which is at war, has millions displaced, has no airmail (all mail is being transported by land, over the border) and has its infrastructure severely impaired in many places. More importantly, we don’t see a backlog forming: mail is flowing slowly, but steadily, with no sudden halt on the delivery that we can detect. -
Lastly, claims that our decision is political — or racist! — are plain wrong, as well as being offensive and disrespectful to us. We based our decision on Postcrossing’s data and took into account the interests of the community as a whole, which obviously included the members in China, and those not in China just as well. We do our best to be politically neutral in our decisions about the project and while this is not always easy to do and we may not be perfect at it, it is still what we aim for. If this topic continues to be used to treat us — or other members — disrespectfully, we will close the topic and use it only for publishing updates about the situation.
I’m sure there are things written on this topic that could be addressed too, but I can’t possibly cover everything or reply to every single person, so I hope all the above helps better understand the scenario that made us take this decision.
Postcrossing is about exchanging postcards, and for that, mail needs to be received — when that does not happen, everyone is affected. We honestly hope that mail delivery in China is resumed very soon and that we are able to reverse this temporary suspension. We’ll continue to monitor the situation closely.
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So how can you monitor it? when this “slow condition” stop, you need to reopen it immediately.
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@paulo Hi paulo ，you might wrong.In the first link it said it closes the Shanghai, Changchun and Yanji mail processing centres.But,now in China it has more than 10 mail processing centres.
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Thank you so much for all you do. Clearly, your hard work can sometimes amount to a thankless job but so many of us truly do appreciate your efforts and respect your wisdom on these topics.
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He answered this in great detail in the post directly above yours.
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I second your statement, littlesthobo!
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Just a biref conclusion on Paulo’s reply:
Based on some “convincing” reasons, the team wants to suspend Chinese address, so they just suspended Chinese address. There is no need for discussion, votes or notice in advance.
(Personally, I have no comment on whether it is appropriate about this practice. )
However, I do not have many hopes due to the following reasons:
- There is no clear standard. Users do not know conditions of reopen. That’s to say, it is all up to the team.
- Though there is a vote that says 3/4 of users find it not making sense for this suspension, the team chooses to ignore. Then what can be worse?
I know the team may not to mean this, but for Chinese users, it just look like “we only need your cards for free and you do not deserve receiving one”.
However, sadly it seems difficult to think from the perspective of others.
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He only said " as soon as we see clear signs that the already traveling postcards are indeed being delivered and the backlog is being cleared, we will restore the route. " There is no standard about the definition of the “being delivered” it’s unconvincible
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Thanks for the explanation.
Hope the situation gets normal soon 
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I guess the topic of private swap inside the forum should kind of be covered or be clear?
I know is each of person’ s own action. But this announcement has affected peoples attitude on private swap as well. I have experience “stop” because of this announcement. And I can also see people from other platforms say no for Chinese user based on this announcement…Isn’t it unfair? Plz be more clear on some of the explanations. And how about Tag? By somehow it feels like we are suspended from all the activities because of this stop announcement. Isn’t that sad?
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It makes sense to me. Admin has said: When Chinese deliveries get closer to their usual standard in terms of percentages received, Chinese addresses will be given out again. It is estimated to take a few weeks to get back to normal.
I really do think this is the best explanation you are going to get. I know you were hoping for better but this is the best they can do for now.
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I hope when Such things happend to other countries.especially in your country, you can still hold such neutral altitude.Otherwise that is called double standard.
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Could you please give me the detailed data standard that when will you stop the suspension. I believe you have thought about this thoroughly before making this controversial decision, right? So, what is the standard?
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