Anything business oriented posted there is spamming if not placed in the SERVICES section unless for a very few exceptions. Craigslist is not meant for businesses, it is meant for individuals as spelled out in the TOS. Craigslist TOS do NOT allow commercial services or businesses to post in the categories save a very few exceptions. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise - and every little bit helps. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites - especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets.

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Or if it's really an issue, then certain posts that get jerked back and forth could finally be 'locked' by an admin based on their discretion. Craigslist says it's constantly tweaking its systems to avoid this kind of thing, but why not have a Wikipedia-style setup, where 'deleted' spam posts can be reviewed by folks who can 'undelete' the not-spam ones? It can use the same basic system, where if enough people vote that a 'spam' post is legit, it goes back online. It's being used by some companies to maliciously pull down perfectly legitimate posts from competitors. But, according to the linked article above, there's software out there that will let you 'flag as spam' any post you want, sending multiple clicks pretending to come from unique users. For the most part, this system is both effective and efficient. As you may know, Craigslist has a little link on each post that allows any reader to 'flag as spam.' There's an automated system that takes note of these clicks, and if enough such clicks come from enough unique users, the post is automatically pulled off the site. And, while there definitely have been some products built on top of Craigslist, I hadn't realized it had gone so far as to include software that will try to trick Craigslist into deleting a post as spam. We've seen this with companies like Microsoft, eBay and Google of course. One sign of a successful software company is when an ecosystem starts to build around it.

Stop flagging on craigslist