Saturday, May 4, 2013

Classified Ad Sites Suck

One thing I hate about Classified Ad Sites is that they suck!  Each site has their own reasons for sucking.  There are two classified ad sites I use: Craigslist and Classifieds For Free.  I will explain what makes these two sites suck.  Both are free sites, so you can't expect perfection, but their suckage is frustrating.

Craigslist sucks because they are a bunch of freedom of speech violators.  Craigslist will flag your post for removal for no legitimate reason, other than to say you violated terms of service.  That's a load of crap.  What's bad about Craigslist is anybody can have your post flagged for removal.  You can have your post flagged for removal just because someone doesn't like you.  Craigslist also doesn't like when you post certain stuff in their forums.  You want to complain about an ad, and you post your complaint in the forum, they tell you it's the wrong place to post your ad.  It's another load of bull crap.

Most people don't trust Craigslist anyway because of all the scams on there, but you can't post about a scam regarding an ad on their forum because they'll tell you you are wasting space by posting to the wrong forum.  I guess I can call the people at Craigslist hypocrites because they themselves are freedom of speech violators by their own complaining.  They think they're right and everyone else is wrong.

On the other hand, Classifieds For Free doesn't suck in the same respect as Craigslist since Classifieds For Free accepts any ad you post.  However, they have their own reason for suckage.  Classifieds For Free sucks because every now and then you will get some error on  your userid.  The error will be something like this:

Fatal: Operation failed while performing SELECT count(AdID) FROM ad where UserID='jb529' because: Table '.\classif\ad' is marked as crashed and should be repaired

Here's the situation: your ads expire after a week, so you have to renew your ads everyday, or a least every 3 days to make sure they stay active.  It seems Classifieds For Free does not seem to care about fixing their errors because they take at least a week or more to fix the above error.  The error will keep you from being able to renew your ads, and by the time the error is fixed, your ads have expired.  This means your ads will not show, and you have to start over from scratch.  

I have had the above error occur twice recently and have had to start over with reposting ads.  Because of this, any ad I post to Classifieds For Free will also be posted here as a comment so when this happens again I will be able to retrieve my ads and repost them when I am able to.  

This is why Classifieds For Free suck big time.

One classified ad site that does not suck is Backpage.  It's design is similar to that of Craigslist, but at least you don't have your ads flagged for removal just because someone does not like you.  You can pretty much place any ad you want for free for most niches; you will just have to renew you ad every several months.  However, if you want to post any ad related to the Adult Industry, you will have to pay.

I understand you probably want to place ads with as little to no money as possible, but since the Adult Industry (whether dating, chat, or anything else in this industry) can be financially rewarding for an affiliate in this industry, it might be well worthwhile to pay to place these types of ads on Backpage.  The Adult Industry attracts thousands of customers no matter where the economy stands, and so if you make just a small investment, the return on investment can be highly rewarding making a substantial income. 

This is why a lot of classified ad sites suck.  This is also why Backpage has a thumbs up from me.  Sure there are scams that come out of Backpage ads, and I've seen and read about victims of these scams in the media.  However, there are a lot of users on Backpage with good intentions.  You can be one of those.

With my rant on why classified ad sites suck, I'll leave it as I have written.  Should I come up with more reasons, I will post as a comment, and if you come up with more sites that suck, feel free to comment.  As I said above, as I repost my ads on Classifieds For Free, I will also post my ads as comments to this post.