What's the Schedule for Updating the "Explore Countries" Page?

Thursday, December 31, 2020 - 23:12 (UTC -5)

Hello, All:

I just looked at the “Countries” Page (https://www.postcrossing.com/explore/countries) and noticed that the “Postcards Sent” Column seems way of out-of-date.

For example, it shows the USA at 6,616,898. We know that the Postcard IDs are sequential within Country. But my US-6617238 was sent March 24, 2020, and received on April 21, 2020. Also, I sent out cards today in the US-724xxxx range.

Now we know that “Sent” is a term of art here in Postcrossing. When we request an address to send out a postcard, that card is really just in transit or “Traveling”. It doesn’t become “successfully” Sent until received AND Registered by the recipient. Even with the generally noted average global transit time of about one full month for all postcards sent through Postcrossing, those numbers on the Country page can’t be THAT far behind, can they? I ask because I was explaining Postcrossing to someone this week and noticed the apparent discrepancy (which I did NOT point out to that person).

Thoughts?

Happy Postcrossing!

Michael

The numbers are automatically updated every time a card is registered.
But it is not only the numbers of the cards that are still on the road that are missing, but also all the cards that have lost over the years on their journey.

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I saw that (the totals are continually updated). But there’s still a drastic difference between the latest sequence numbers and the total Sent, about 620,000 or so. That’s a really large number. Do we know the percentage of terminally expired (> 365 days and then off the Expired list) and Traveling contained in this approximately 620K? And what about the eight months difference between the count and the latest sequence numbers? Does that apparent time difference actually mean anything?

Anyone from Postcrossing Support have some insight on this, please?

Thanks.

6617102 “successfully” sent cards from the US don’t mean that the last registered one has US-6617102 as ID. I have seen cards with US-722xxxx being registered today.

US-6617238 was the 6617238th postcrossing card that was sent from US to somewhere in the world but not the 6617238th card that was registered.
And now we have 724xxxx cards that were sent from US and from those cards are now registered 6617238 cards.

And that means too that from March until now more than 600000 cards are sent from the US.

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Maybe ‘sent’ renamed to ‘registered’ would be more correct?

All countries show a difference between most-recent-ID and ‘cards sent’ in explore. Difference is somewhere between 6,3% for DE, 7% for AT, 8,3% for US (rule-of-thumb mathematics, not correct by the seventh decimal place). Part of this difference is lost cards, second part cards still traveling, and of course there are cards never sent.

So as I see it, there is no time difference, just a difference between country-ID-count and postal reality.

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Or “received (from)” …

The use of the word ‘sent’ on the Explore Countries is used in the same way that it is used on our individual profiles, and we know that to mean that it represents those cards that have been sent+registered. That is, I’ve had 259 cards marked as sent, but I’ve actually dropped around 280 in the post…some of them are currently traveling, and some were lost in the mail.

So, the word’s usage is consistent on the site, and it just takes knowing how that word is being used in the site. (That’s just like any hobby, skill, etc. Learning the lingo is part of it.)

On this topic that I created a couple of weeks ago, I found that the US is sending cards at a rate of 100,000 every 40 days or so, so 600,000 is 240 days, or right at 8 months, which closely matches the differences in postcards (successfully) sent vs. IDs drawn.

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Well, there could be cards received but not registered (for whatever reason), so registered would be the most accurate, I think. But, as @TheBeaverFamily points out, sent is the established term in our very own version of pc-lingo :wink:

Thanks, everyone, for clarifying all this for me.