Craigslist 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 used for 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 see it, but no one can find it. It's a sneaky way they found to get rid of people they don't want posting on Craigslist. So how do you stop Craigslist from ghosting your ads? How do you beat Craigslist ghosting problem? Another big question is how do you stop Craigslist flagging? I'm sure you are already aware of flagging since Craigslist puts a big link at the top of every post so they can be flagged. How do you deal with this? 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. That a small percentage of posts get flagged and you must have broken some rules to cause the community to get angry and flag your post. That you should make changes and repost your message. Unfortunately 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 flagging problem, they decided to so something sneaky and underhanded. They decided to just Ghost anybody that they had the slightest inkling would be trouble. Of coarse there is abuse of this also. If they don't like your name, your links, your pictures, your whatever, you will get ghosted. 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 48 hour 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!
OK, so now we know what the problem is, so how do we take care of it? How do we deal with this craziness? Read onto the next page where all my workaround are explained.
Continue to Ghosting Page 2.....
