How To Prevent Auto-Flagging on Craigslist

How To Stop The Craigslist Mega Bitch

One of the most frustrating aspects of posting is seeing your ads auto-deleted, en masse.  According to Craigslist, if your ad is flagged by an indiscriminate flagger (e.g., a competitor), you can repost with changes, but when you go about doing that, you find that maybe every single ad is flagged?  They then provide virtually no support, and if you see one of their developer's response on Quora, wonder if maybe they are too full of hubris to ask themselves if maybe they're going the wrong way about things and hurting people in the process.

For the person suffering the disease of auto-flagging.  Nothing sticks, nothing goes live, and you ask yourself: WHY?  

It's because Craigslist has narrowed the restrictions on what they allow, like any good dictator, ex-wife or mega bitch, they are out to get you in the cleverest ways possible.  They don't want to just banish you, they want to bring you down.

This is a guide for those of you that have played by the rules, found Craigslist unresponsive to your pleas, and while you'd love to use a competing service like OfferUp or Backpage, maybe you're posting a small business ad that is getting flagged down by competitors, and there are no good alternatives to Craigslist, not yet anyway, where you can make a living off your ads.  And remember, Craigslist does not care that you have a family to feed and they have no problem letting your competitors that have learned to game the system get away with over posting while they allow their lazy automation systems to flag down everyone else's ads.  

Just do a search for "garage door repair" on any service section on Craigslist, you'll probably find it's one lead generation company owned by an Israeli or Russian I believe, that has flagged everyone else down and has only their ads showing for the most part in virtually every city, there's probably dozens if not hundreds posted a day, and almost all stick while everyone else's flags.  Is that fair?

The reasonable alternative to this would be creating a directory instead of listings so each small business gets a piece of the pie, and rotating the directory listings for unique results each time based on the visitor's IP address location, browser location, and search history, so every small business in each city gets traffic and ad views.  Then, have the algorithm for all the classifieds based on a rating system, rather than a flagging system.  It will still be gamed, true, but at least it will be more fair than having almost every ad removed, and provide a far richer user experience for Craigslist visitors as they will have a wider variety of choices, a history of feedback from other users (and while you're at it, allow account ratings too, showing flagging and flagged ad histories, and tie those up into an algorithm so those that abuse the flagging system have far less weight than a standard user that doesn't sit around flagging hundreds of ads each day).  But anyway....for the typical visitor to this site, and not Craig or Jim or anyone else at Craigslist (for who the above message was for), you probably want to know how to get at least one ad to stick.  Here's some info:

Reasons Craigslist cites for ads being flagged:

• Ad is posted outside the local area (non-local IP address).
• You posted more than one ad per category per account within 48 hours.  Yep, the old 3 ads per day per account rule NO LONGER APPLIES.
• You included a name, address, phone number, web site in your ad body.
• You included contact info in your image, even a phone number on a yard sign they say will cause flagging.
• Moderators claim that ads can be flagged simply for not putting enough detail in too, for example, are you an auto-dealer posting in by owner? Guess what?  They will flag the ad simply because it has a photo of a car on a street instead of in a driveway (apparently ignoring the fact not everyone has a driveway, especially those living in major cities).

So the best way to avoid auto-flagging?

1. Use a local residential IP.
2. Only use each account once every 48 hours.
3. They recommend deleting your previous ads before re-posting new ones with the same or similar content, if you find ads are still being flagged after 48 hours, try that.
4. Use local phone numbers, and make sure to use the number you verify the account with in the phone field for the local posting.
5. If you're putting a phone number in an image, try to blend it in so their image reading systems can't scan it and ID it.  You'll notice that garage door repair company has blurry images with the phone number a bit blurry too, that's how they get around it most likely.
6. Although they do not say this in their flag forum, there is evidence suggesting many of the classified web sites are mining social media data to rate new user account.  The Advanced Interactive Media Group's Classified Intelligence/Classified Intelligence Report, an industry newsletter that costs a thousand dollars or so I believe, and which is mainly focused on reporting the latest news on Craigslist, Backpage and other classified web sites, stated in their last report that classifieds are starting to look at and use social media data, which means Google, Facebook and others could be sharing data with Craigslist or a third party service that Craigslist contracts out to, so if the email you're using doesn't have a life beyond Craigslist, it might get penalized or even trashed as they'll view it as potential spam, even if it isn't.  Say it's just an email you created so you could download virtual reality porn, and don't want your wife to know because maybe you two share an email, but either way, if that report is correct, then most likely, a new account created with that new email, might not work.

You might also be saying, well, how can I get that many accounts and phone numbers to post one ad per account every 48 hours?  Well, there's good news and bad news, the good news is you can now use Google Voice (just create one for each gmail you use) or use an app on your smart phone, TextMe.  You can get free phone numbers from it, which you can then use.  The bad news is you have to log into each one to get the calls, and watch a lot of videos to get free credits, and also, it might not continue to work indefinitely (if it even still works).  Make sure to send the calls as VOICE, not SMS though, when using TextMe.