Craigslist is up to its old tricks again. In what we assume is an effort to poke Zillow in the eye (and perhaps reduce over-posting) they’re ghosting legitimate posts in high-population areas en mass.
Ok, ghosting is not a real word. Rather, it’s community slang for Craiglist’s occasional-pehaps-frequent practice of showing you the post you just created but hiding it from everyone else.
Craigslist is clearly targeting any posts originating from RentJuice and Postlets. But that’s only the beginning.
Here’s some other activities that can get your posts ghosted:
- Too much HTML
- Too many hyperlinks
- Not uploading photos using Craigslist’s super-crappy photo gallery upload thingy
- Not using the new Craigslist Padmapper … er … mapping feature
- Not going to church
- Secretly wishing for the old days when you paid honest newspapers a reasonable sum of money to print your rental ads — no headache necessary
Again, this seems to be happening only in high-population areas, and not to every Craigslist account. The really bad news, though, is that you don’t need to over-post to get tangled up in this mess.
The apartment finder down the street could be happily dumping 600 quasi-legal posts a day on Craigslist. Meanwhile, a legitimate landlord just trying to rent his garden apartment is getting ghosted by the ghoul squad — and he might not even know it. All this small landlord knows is that, suddenly, no one is replying to his ads.
Craig, has anyone told you recently that you’re behaving like a jerk?
The ShowMojo team is determined to right this wrong. We’ve added a new post template, the Newmark Special, to circumvent the Craigslist ghoul squad. In preview mode this template looks craptastic (just the way Craig likes it). But when pasted into the Craigslist description field it gets the job done. Also, as noted above, you’ll need to upload photos independent of the template.
The really good news. The ShowMojo schedule-a-showing button is in the post, front and center.
We will continue to refine this template, and add back other valuable elements such as photos and other-places-you-might-like.
To be clear, these Craigslist shenanagins do not appear to be affecting many of our customers. But some of our customers in highly-populated areas have been impacted. The point: we’re here for all of you.
And … only because it might now really matter … have you been going to church?