I had over 100 free swap credits, since I have printer problems and there's no use for those swap credits with standard membership I started handwriting labels some time back. So today I checked my free swap credit registry after seeing another thread on free swaps. And I now have none. Zippo. Nary a one.

OK I know the registry only shows the past 6 months and since I've a standard membership I have unlimited swaps, but I didn't know they could disappear. Seems a bit unfair since I did pay for those free swaps using PBS postage to the tune of more or less $50 (100 x 55¢ fee/transaction roughly). PBS has maintained they can shift from year to year but apparently not when they disappear.

I'd use the contact us link below as my free swap credits are still there. It sounds like there may be a glitch. As a standard member they are pretty much useless to me but they still get earned when I mail books with PBS Postage.

They're not actually gone, they just don't have any place to display the total if you haven't had any activity in the past 6 months. This is a design bug in the UI.

At the top of the screen, you see something like this (you may have different numbers of course):

    Credits: 23   |   Free Swaps: Unlimited   |   Money: $0.00

You can click on the words "Credits", "Free Swaps", "Money" to see the detailed registry for the past 6 months if you have any activity. If there's no activity, then the detail page just has a message and it doesn't show the balance.

For Credits and Money, this is not a problem because even if you don't have any activity, the numbers at the top of the screen do show your correct balance. For Free Swaps, if you don't have any activity, there's no way to see the actual balance because they put Unlimited at the top. It's still there in the system though. If you were to use printable postage again today, the Free Swaps registry would then have an entry, and the balance on the details page would include your previous swaps.

You might want to send in feedback asking the PBS Team to add the balance to the registry detail page, even if there haven't been any transactions in 6 months.

I've sent my concern along to PBS via the 'contact us' button. I'll post their reply when it comes.

Here's the reply from PBS:

Your Free Swaps have not disappeared. They are still there.

We're sorry for the confusing notation on the Registry. We'll put it on our list to change that!

Have a great day,

The PaperBackSwap Team
www.PaperBackSwap.com

Marya- I sent in my concerns about that a year ago, and got the same response. Guess they forgot to check their list.

Either that or it's way down on the bottom of the list.