Karl Katzke

Is Craig around? Someone needs to tell Jim that they need to find a genius to recode their site to protect against malicious posting.

In all the areas I frequent on Craigslist — College Station, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, D/FW — the listings in the vehicles, motorcycles, and even the dating sections have become useless. The spam postings aren’t obvious at first. You only know you’ve hit the spam goldmine when you answer an ad and your mailbox immediately fills up with spam. There’s little details in some of them — references to places that aren’t in the town whose site you’re visiting, a picture that obviously is not the person being described, but most of them could be real posts… which means that the community filtering grabs a lot of ham along with the spam.

I’ve used Craigslist since the day it expanded to Portland, and some of my best times have come out of things I’ve found on that site. I’ve got no idea how it can be saved, and no idea if it can be saved. This is going to be an interesting problem to watch the company hurdle.