[NOT A BUG] Travelling vs. travelled

One of my postcards was received today. It says that the card travelled for 24 days. But when I look at my travelling cards that were sent on the same day, it says they have been travelling for 23 days. Are the two numbers counted differently? Shouldn’t they be the same?


Wouldn’t it depend on what time of day it was registered perhaps? Like 11:30pm vs 12:45am?

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Indeed I also got that impression. I think the traveling days is calculated by subtracting the sent date from the received date and taking the time into account. And then some rounding rule (like if it is 23 days and 1 hour in between, it will say 24 days).

Perhaps you pulled this address earlier than the others.

Well I took the screen of my travelling cards after the one card was registered. But I guess it could be that the travelling cards are counted in my timezone and the received in the receiver’s timezone (but with sent timestamp still in my timezone) :thinking: Because that part of Russia has +1 hour to me. In that case it does sound like a bug to me.

Nope, I took them all in one batch and the registered is actually from almost exactly the middle of that batch.

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Only spotted this one now. Not quite a bug, but I can see why it can be confusing, but there’s a good reason. It’s mostly to try to reduce confusion and make values more sensible.

When a postcard is registered, we calculate it’s travel days by rounding the resulting number, e.g., 7.5 days will show as 8 days while 7.4 days will show as 7 days. This is a reasonable compromise because a postcard that took 7.1 days should not show as 8 (round up), nor a postcard that took 7.9 days should as only 7 days (round down). So we round the to nearest integer to get the best approximate value.

For the traveling postcards, we also do some rounding, but opt to always round down. The reason for the different approach is primarily for when you have very recently sent a postcard: you don’t want it to show traveling for “1 day” already when it was going for only, say, 12h (0.5 days which rounds to 1) — that would also be confusing too: you expect it to only change around the time of the day it was sent. By rounding down, the travel time will increase by a day only when a full periods of 24h have passed which for traveling postcards seem more correct.

So, in short: for received postcards, we round values to better illustrate the (approximate) travel times. For traveling, we round down to better illustrate for how many days it has been traveling already.

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