Invisible on Craigslist
I’ve had a lot of success selling things on Craigslist. When I lived in Houston I sold nearly everything I owned on there, and for reasonably good prices as well. Lately though Craigslist has caused me quite a bit of frustration.
I really enjoy writing detailed listings and experimenting with what causes items to sell for the best price. I normally take lots of photos of an item, choose the best four to upload to craigslist, then post the remaining photos in my gallery in higher resolution formats. This way I could link to these higher resolution photos from the listing. I’ve done this for nearly every item I’ve ever posted.
Back in August I listed my iPhone 3GS on Craigslist, along with links to the additional photos in my personal photo gallery. Evidently, this triggered some sort of flag in the Craigslist filters, because since then nothing I post ever shows up on the site.
Now, when I post something the whole process looks perfectly normal and I pass the captcha phase and get a confirmation that my listing has been posted. I even get the email they send you with a link to your post, and the link works and displays your post. But it never shows up in the listings on the site, nor does it show up in any search results. This practice is called “Ghosting”.
At first I thought it was the fact that I included a few links in the post, or that maybe my listings were too long (I write very detailed listings), so I simplified the posts and included no HTML. But after failing to have my posts show up on the site, I asked Sandy to try posting the exact same items, using my same text, and the posts show up for her with no problem. The issue seems to be with my entire account.
Several other oddities have happened since the issue began in August. Three or four times since then Craigslist has asked me to re-verify my phone number, and has also requested that I change my password a few times. I certainly don’t mind doing this if it helps get my account back in good standing, but it doesn’t appear to make any difference.
I understand that Craigslist has to deal with more scammers, spammers, and sleeze than I can even imagine. They have to be proactive and handle the issue so that the site doesn’t become overrun and useless, but by silently blocking regular users the site is also becoming useless. My real issue is that there is no way for legitimate users to contact Craigslist to try to get these issues fixed. They direct you to their community forums for support from other Craigslist users. I posted my problem there and essentially got canned responses and some minor trolling. Not at all helpful.
Hey, Jim Buckmaster, how about trying one of these options:
- Charge for a few more categories so you can hire some more support people to help out with situations like this.
- Allow me to pay you an annual fee to get avoid being ghosted.
- Implement better filters that result in fewer false positives.
