Craigslist TOU friend or foe
Comments(5)I was searching this morning to find some information I needed for a conference call about Craigslist today. I will discuss some of the things I learned later. While searching, I happened upon a neat group of sites that I would like to share. It seems that when Craig wrote the Craigslist terms of use, he nailed it.
The terms are so good, in fact, that when some other businesses read his terms, they immediately copy and paste them to their own website without replacing every instance of “craigslist” with their own name.
Websites that stole Craig’s terms of use
- http://www.indiaclassy.com/terms.html
- http://www.curdy.com/terms-of-use.html
- http://www.juliesbarn.com/home/?view=terms&cityid=-55
- http://www.dateilicious.com/Terms.php
- http://www.rockstarrecruiting.com/corp/terms
- http://www.worldpropertyservices.com/terms.cfm
- http://www.aiscolorado.org/termsofuse.htm
- http://classifiedtree.com/rptcontentmgmt.aspx?inid=7
- http://www.yokepal.com/terms_of_services.php
- http://www.internationalgcl.com/terms.php
- http://iannouncethis.com/terms-of-use.html
- http://yodoleslist.com/terms.htm
The list goes on and on and on. I am stunned by the amount of half-assed companies that are too lazy to do a simple find and replace after taking someone else’s work.
Friend or Foe?
Craigslist is a game changer. Dealers that have never heard of CL are stunned to hear that it is a free service that can get 1,000 people to view a car classified ad in a single day. However, in its present form, craigslist will not change the automotive industry. Imagine a day where as many dealers that refresh their listings on Autotrader can do the same thing on craigslist. Mayhem. The (lack of) search features on CL prevent thousands of new items in a single day to be properly sorted and consumed by shoppers.
The wall that holds back this onslaught of ads is the terms of service. Dealers rely on third parties to distribute their ads, and craigslist does not permit third parties to create ads. This makes the craigslist terms of service a huge road block for a lot of companies like mine.
I see it differently. The TOU is what enables me to succeed on the site. It protects the listings I create from the onslaught of violators and spammers. If you take the time to read the terms and become a regular user of the site it is not long before you can make the posting process more efficient without violating the mighty posting agent section of the terms.
Take aways
I learned a few things today. First, there is always someone out there with a sloppy written program that gives me clues on how to automate tasks. For example, one of the people in the conference call today mentioned he can combat competitors that relentlessly flag your legit ads to hurt your business. I had not considered a flagging bot until this was said, but a simple search turns up Craig’s Flagger, a program that automates the process of terminating any ad posted by a spammer. It does not work. No surprise. Put a tool like this out in the open that can easily be identified after it starts flagging at the click of a button.
I also learned that keyword stuffing still works to this day. I see ads that have random chunks of other web pages at the bottom. Thomas Jefferson quotes, UNIX user manual sections, you name it and someone has surely used it to trip up the CL filters.
The most exciting thing about today’s conference was I found out that my tactics are still a cut above the rest. I was fairly convinced when I noticed a couple competitors redesigning their ad designs to be 90% copies of mine, but today I was stunned to see one of the most sophisticated craigslist programs I have demoed to date–one capable of completely automatic daily posting without the risk of detection as a single source–struggling with the filters (see previous paragraph).
Is the craigslist terms of use friend or foe? What does that tell you about your commitment to craigslist success?
I live to flag dealers (ie. spammers) on craigslist. It’s my hobby.
(no, I’m not a dealer. Just a private user of CL. I love CL, and I’m willing to work to keep it a free, person to person service.)
Steve, thanks for your feedback. I am also not a dealer, but a web developer. Part of my job is to keep dealers that want my help out of the spam category. While I can not agree that all dealers = spam, I do believe that dealership mass posting is a problem. Have you ever tried viewing only by owner listings instead of all? If you find dealer ads in the by owner board, flag away, but search filters are available.
Craigslist is basically useless at this point.
The spammers post ads automatically and then their bots flag all others ads to death.
I proved it today, for example, by copying ads that miraculously survived. These verbatim copies were flagged within minutes. Yet the identical originals were still there. None were offensive or spam or wrongly posted.
The point is that the only ads that can remain are those from the spammers, which, sadly, spells the demise of Craigslist as a useful tool for the individual (these ads were all in the personals sections).
RIP Craigslist! You rocked! Now you’re gone.
Hi Corey,
Just came across your site; you’re doing a good job with it. I owe it to myself and my team to clarify the indiscretion with the TOU. In an effort to get this site off the ground and running, we had originally hired an overseas programming effort that had promised us a great script that we’d be able to quickly utilize. Despite our best attempts to correctly guide, everything fell apart and we soon came to realize it was a dubious affair. There were red flags left and right with them, and this is just an indication of one; without our knowledge they had copied everything verbatim. This is just one of their less than honest practices that we became aware of. After 3 months, we chalked it up as a sunk cost and left the site as is until we found another programmer. Unfortunately we didn’t get moving again till as of late when all these issues came to light. My current programmer is the one that brought this to my attention and we’ve hired a proper attorney now that has drafted our current TOU. If I had known earlier myself I would have attempted to change this ages ago, believe me. I see your blog post was made in May ‘08, and as you can gather, the site has been sitting there as is until this past week. I don’t want to shift blame as I should have been more careful and cautious in overseeing these programmers, but there were a lot of other issues that needed my attention first to correct. But you learn from your mistakes. That said, I want to directly apologize on behalf of us at CM. If you knew my new team you would be able to quickly see how all of are extremely passionate in what we do and the service we provide. Thanks for you time and all the best.
regards,
Peter
Peter, thanks for your kind words. I had to take a few minutes to figure out what post you were even talking about, and I hope you don’t mind that I moved your comment here from my About page.
I suppose my site was indexed somewhere for your name, and I understand why that is troublesome. I have removed your URL from the list in this post since it no longer fits.
Glad to hear that you are making progress with the site, and I wish you well. If your team uses Wordpress and need some coding assistance, let me know.