Ghosting

Why don’t my posts show up on Craigslist?

For those of you not familiar with the changes that have taken place on Craigslist over the years, you may not be familiar with this term. ‘Ghosting’ is the term applied to when you make a post on Craigslist, and the system tells you that your post has been published but your post never appears on the front page of Craigslist. The system gives you a post ID and a URL and you can see your post if you put the post’s URL in your browser, but unfortunately no one else will be able to see it because it will never appear on the front page. Your post becomes like a ghost wandering the back halls of Craigslist aimlessly looking for someone to look at it, but no one can see it. It’s a sneaky way they found to get rid of people they don’t want posting on Craigslist. So how do you keep your posts free from ghosting? Keep reading!

Before ghosting, every post you made would show up on the front page of Craigslist. Every time your post was flagged you would get a courtesy email telling you that they were sorry that your message got flagged. If your message was removed by the Craigslist staff, you would not get an email about it. Your post would simply disappear without any warning. People eventually got wise to what was happening and would keep an eye on their emails. Flagging became such a huge problem (and still is) that people would have to make multiple posts, or constantly check their emails just to keep their posts active. After a while Craigslist realized what was happening and instead of doing something productive or useful to solve the problem, they decided to so something sneaky and underhanded. They decided to just Ghost anybody that they had the slightest inkling would be trouble. Some of you might think this is perfectly fair. After all what’s wrong with getting rid of trouble makers? The problem is that this is applied indiscriminately to just about anyone. A 70 year old granny can make a post selling her delicious cookies and have her post ghosted for no reason at all. While a prostitute can make an elicit sexual offer and that post doesn’t get ghosted.

The staff at Craigslist operates with no rhyme or reason. Don’t bother trying to figure out why they do it, just accept that it will happen. Don’t bother asking them why your perfectly innocent post got ghosted because they will either not respond, or they will give you some BS answer about it has to do with bandwidth or some nonsense like that. They have ready made answers to pacify the gullible.

You can get on Craigslist any day of the week and you can find lots of spammers, people making multiple posts within the 48hour time period that the TOS says you have to allow between posts, and they don’t get ghosted. You go ahead and try making two posts in a row and you’ll be banned for life. No warnings, no review process, just BANNED!

Another way to get ghosted it to get flagged. Just like I discussed in another post, you can get fagged by a competitor just trying to beat out all the competition. So you get flagged, you MUST be a trouble maker, and EVERY post you make from that moment on will get ghosted.

So do we let Craigslist get away with this? Hell NO! I’ll tell you some tried and true methods I have found to get around their underhanded Nazi, fascist tactics. It will mean a bit of work, but for those of you that don’t like being pushed around and don’t appreciate some jerks in this world trampling all over your right to free speech, you’ll find it’s worth it.

First of all there are lots of free services on the internet, I suggest you use them. Free emails are especially useful. Get a free email account and use that to get your publishing email. There are many emails that self destruct after a few hours, use those. Don’t bother keeping an email account for too long or they’ll get wise to you.

If you advertise a phone number in your ad, use a cell phone. Many companies will allow you to change your number every so often. There are also disposable phone numbers that you can change frequently.

If you advertise a web site or have the post send customers to your website use free websites and change your address frequently. Use free domains, and use URL redirecting sites. That way you can have many different web addresses but they all go to the same place.

When you log in to make a post on Craigslist use a proxy server. Change your IP often. Change computers if you can. Clear all your cookies and Java script. Change the referrers in your browser to 1.

Keep checking on your posts and if they don’t show up you know you’ve been ghosted and it’s time to change any of the above. Change the name you use. Change the wording. Be creative. Copy what other people post.

You do all of these things and you will be able to keep posting on Craigslist and they will NEVER be able to ghost you. Every time one thing fails, move on to another. Keep them on their toes, and make them work at it. The problem is most people just give in, and that’s what they are counting on. If you all fight back, they won’t be able to play games like that with your posts. I’ll keep updating this information every time I learn something new.

I can tell you that I have been banned many times from Craigslist and I still am able to make posts there today by using these techniques. I wasn’t banned for being a trouble maker in the traditional sense of the word. I was banned because competitors didn’t like that I had lower prices than they did, and I was getting flagged. To make matters worse I actually wrote complaints to the Craigslist staff and to Craig Newmark himself. That pissed them off! So instead of helping me they banned me. Nice aren’t they! So I decided to share my secrets with everyone.