The Initial Assault
Like most Americans, I have stuff. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to find a new home for my stuff so that I can get more stuff. If I am starting to sound a little like George Carlin, that’s okay. I like his rant about stuff almost as much as his rant about dirty words. So in my effort to purge some of my stuff I turned to that well known of new American institutions known as CraigsList or CL as it’s referred to by the denizens of that domain.
I had several items that required getting rid of. So like a good, studious individual I researched my prices, found succinct descriptions and created a post for each individual item or group of items. Some things are so good you have to have more than one you know? Anyway I did my prep work, created a CL account and got to posting. One hour and 14 posts later, I was satisfied with my results. I already had two hits on my ads. One turned out to be a scammer trying to phish my info but that’s another story. With day one of the purge completed, I logged off with a satisfied feeling that I was getting the job done and not fulfilling my normal mandate that comes with being a card carrying member of the Procrastinator’s Club of America.
Begin Day Two of the Purge
I log on to see that 7 of my posts have been flagged/removed.
What?!?
I immediately went to the help forums to find out why. I was immediately accosted, yes accosted, by no less than 4 people (possibly more because several posted with a hyphen or some anonymous means). The whole process was very disheartening. At one point I was told to FOAD. I was also called dense, accused of being a spammer, told to go back to fleabay and told told get lost a couple of times (in not so nice words). One person in particular seemed very focused on devaluing my offerings rather than being any help as to why I would be flagged. In total it took more than 30 posts to get two helpful answers with why my posts were flagged.
I commented with some praise for the two helpful answers to be rewarded with a troll reference. Needless to say I was a bit worked up about this whole experience. I work in a customer service based business doing phone and desk side support. It saddened me to see folks who were supposed to providing service, volunteer or not, behaving like that. Is this really what CL management wants the world to see?
The sun set on that day and a third before I decided to revisit the possibility of using CraigsList to list my items again.
the Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Posts
A New Beginning? That was my hope. Having cooled off a bit, I revisited the thread spawn of hate that was my issue posting to see it with fresh eyes. Nope. Nothing new. Either I am still pretty pissed about what they said to me or I really wasn’t that far off base. I was thinking the former was the bigger possibility at first. Like I said, at first. I logged in and put together the first of my two posts for the day. It went rather smoothly. I followed the advice that was provided when I had my initial problem, reviewed the preview and posted it. I then went to my management window to see what it’s status was. After all, they had called me a spammer. This would give me an indication if the post was blocked right? Wrong. But we’ll get to that since it gets better. Having been told that I was posting too quickly, I decided that I would post no more than once per hour. I would also limit my number of posts to three. That seemed like a fair number since I had seen lot’s of folks posting that way during my research.
I wouldn’t get to three however. I almost didn’t make it to two. When I posted the second, I was faced with a request to change my password.
Simple enough, done.
Then a request to enter another verification code.
“Okay, I’ll play along”, I thought as I entered my phone number. Then the familiar preview window opened. I approved the post after making a couple of minor tweaks and spelling corrections. Once again I returned to the management window. Again I was greeted with the soothing green bar telling me that my post was ‘Active’.
What wasn’t clear is that Active does not mean posted. On a whim, I checked the forum I was posting in before I began.
My two previous posts were conspicuously absent. I went to another machine in my office to verify the result. Again, no posts. Yet there they were all shiny and green in the management window. I called my wife at home and asked her to check.
Yes, she could see the post based on URL I composed to take her to the posting.
No she did not see it listed in the day’s posts from the area zone/server.
Hmm…
… Curiouser and Curiouser
Having been a victim of CL help previously, I had no desire to expose myself to that again. For those of you who know me, you know that while I am sensitive I am not soft. I can play hard case with some of the best – the YMSN Crew on FB can attest to that. So I decided on the ghost approach. I would haunt the forums and search for an answer to my missing posts. Surely someone else was having the same problem. So I went to the CL Help page. The first item under the FAQ? Where is my post?
This was almost too easy!
I went through each line of the common issues and verified that I was compliant with everything until I got to ‘or it may have been removed by community moderation and/or craigslist staff‘. This was the only thing that I couldn’t verify. I was in specter mode. So I continued on to read the forum and learned that what I was experiencing is called ghosting.
Here is the copied ‘fix it’ blob that gets dropped on anyone with enough fortitude to read through it combined with my results as I worked through it -
- Only letters and numbers in the title line? – Absolutely.
- Only letters and a valid location in the location field? – Yes.
- A real price in the value field? - A zero used on one and yes for the other.
- Fill in all the information boxes provided? – Yes.
- Don’t post from out of area? - Yes, verified with the link that was provided in the forum.
- Avoid symbols in the text of your ad such as @#^&*()~<> and / – Hmm could’ve been an issue but corrected it and still no love. Seems more like I am learning a programming syntax now than composing ads.
- Avoid redundant, excessive and unnecessary punctuation marks. Please no “!!!”, “…”, “!?!”, “;)”, etc. – None. I reserve that kind of thing for chat and FB.
- Avoid more than ONE comma in a sentence. – So apparently multiple adjectives, use of pauses, etcetera are not legitimate? Are we learning to program here or composing an ad?
- Don’t Use Stupid Capitalization Because The Filters This Is A Bunch Of Keywords Too. – So maybe my use of Title form for my Title was inappropriate? Still didn’t work.
- Craig asked you to use HTML sparingly, he means it. – Oh no! I used th UL and LI tags. Did the HTML police arrest my ad? What about the other one that didn’t use that?
- Also, if you include a phone number, don’t hookerize, don’t Europeanize it, 555-555-5555, plain and simple. Don’t include phone numbers in personal ads. – Hookerize it? Is this really a term?
- Stats in numbers in a row in a personal ad look like a phone number to the filters, use letters to spell out stats. - No, 4 numbers, a space and 2 numbers is as close as I came.
- Please no links, embedded pictures, clickable pictures, counters, or keywords. – I got that from my roasting two days ago. We’re covered.
- Do not have more than ONE live ad for the same thing up, ghosted ads are still live they are just un-viewable. If you posted 5 ads for the same thing and the all are ghosted DELETE THEM ALL. – Got that one covered as well.
- How you are connecting to the internet matters too. USB modems, aircards and even some services will not work on CL. Your IP address must be local to the craigslist you are posting on. – got all of that covered. Connecting via fiber from one location and via ISDN from another. Once again, my IP is local and verified with your preferred tool for checking it.
- Check your IP address location at www.whatismyipaddress.com – Seriously? We need this a third time?
Wow. A lot of work but my ads are in compliance. I read on further to find that if I have already posted items similar to these I should wait 48 hours prior to trying to post for the same items again. Got that covered also. The clock reads 49 hours between the last ad I was roasted for and the these.
Then as I read on through the slings and arrows I find this little gem…
Let's analyze this... - Help! - 11/21 21:50:34
...the FAQs give no outline of what is/isn't allowed within the text of an ad with regard to punctuation etc. It is only regurgitated here by a few 'helpers' (and I use that term loosely). They have posters jump through all these supposed rule hoops, and then when posters try everything and still get ghosted and very frustrated, these helpers start taking personal shots and fire insults at the posters. It is clear, from the posts here, that there are thousands of users having very similar problems for a very long time now which are never solved. This is an indication of a badly broken system. CL and their helpers are in denial.
Then there is this response…
I think I love you! - cossey - 11/21 21:58:04
I couldn't agree more with that analysis.
Punctuation in ads has absolutely nothing to do with whether ads get posted or not.
Only on rare occasions might using certain non standard characters, symbols and/or punctuation added/posted in certain context appear to the filters as escape characters, command code, delimiting characters, broken/bad HTML, hidden/disquised maliscious code and/or possible exploits.
But it's not often enough to bring up unless it's obvious or everything else is tried and it might be the only possibility left
There You Have It
So I look into things further to find that you can actually get paid support for your ads if you spend $675 and buy a block of them. Yes, $675. Isn’t this kind of like having a Porsche or Jaguar dealership in the midst of a high walled junk yard? You have a great product and great service but no one can see it. It’s not visible past the mountains of crap you have to sort through to get to it. Then, once you do, you have to hope you can afford it. So is this really the public face that CL management wants to put forward? To have abusive volunteers and absentee staff? I’d rather go with Ebay. It has the Local Pickup option that makes things very neat for those heavy items, it’s supported and it’s affordable. The whole thing to me is a parallel of the war between Windows users and Linux users. The whole time I was being verbally bashed I was having flash backs to the Penguin l337 constantly hitting me with with RTFM! While flaming me or closing my threads. I openly invite anyone legitimately with CL to contact me. I would love to discuss this issue in more detail. I make my living from helping people feel better about their technology while we find solutions together.
