I feel like shooting Craigslist with a banana! Because it’s about the most effective weapon there is against their policies! ?
We’ve been fairly successful using Craigslist to find customers in Metro Boston. Now that we are moving back to MN this Spring, we wanted to start building a customer base there so I turned to Craigslist. BANG ? both of my ads were flagged! OK, I thought, I need a separate account and phone number for Minneapolis St. Paul WordPress ads. No problem. I created several and two were flagged. ? So I thought maybe I’m posting too fast. Then this week every ad I’ve put up has been flagged within an hour of posting.
Then I found this statement “In recent years Craigslist has implemented systems that enforce these rules, such as inspecting the area code of the phone number used to verify the Craigslist account and, more reliably (but certainly not 100%), by inspecting the geo-location of users’ IP addresses to determine where they live. If a user lives over a certain distance away from the CL area they’re trying to post to, they’ll experience ad flagging and ghosting, or get their account banned. Craigslist does not discuss details, but best estimates advise users to post within their own state and from an “IP distance” no greater than 500 miles from the area in which they are posting.”
Ouch. ?? . Well, I get it. But really? Really? In the internet age, WordPress Website developers and designers need to be local? Half of my “fix this crap” customers had their websites done by some WordPress site factory in India.