I highly recommend completely reading wikipedia about craigslist. It is very interesting reading and to be honest with you, knowing your friend (or enemy) goes a long way to understanding their site goals, requirements and limits. This will help you plan your posting strategy tactics. Understanding things from craig's point of view really helps.

Craig is after "LOCAL" listings and was originally designed as a local classified/social network. As it expanded it has retained this "local" flavor and this has inflamed it's popularity. It is now the 14th most visited site in the world! 10th in the USA. A very powerful ally if you understand them. They prefer you to advertise only in your local area and determine what your area is by your ip address. More accurately your servers ip address. They also track your computer's user name or ID and place cookies on it. "Cookies enabled" is required.

Like all things human, laziness comes into play here. No matter how geeky or tech savvy the people are at craig they can't cover everything and every one. Bots and the like are relied on to do most of the policing of their site. Their site is rather archaic and they refuse to update its looks or functionality. This seems to be the holy grail because no one is able to compete with them in the free classified market. All the traffic on all other free classified sites, no matter how advanced, do not ad up to the traffic on craig! (Kind of like the US Navy... bigger than the next 14 navies combined!) They only charge for ads in a couple of categories and they are still worth millions (and privately owned).

Craig relies on people doing the "right thing." And to back this up they allow the site to be policed and edited publicly. All you need is an active craig account and you can "flag" any ad you think is inappropriate for any reason! This will cause the ad to be deleted without the poster's consent or input. A sort of "free" labor force for craig.

If to much flagging occurs on your account it will be restricted or even shut down. Nobody knows the exact metrics on this algorithm but it seems to be rather haphazard. Basically if you cause an issues or problems for craig your account is restricted. To many flagged ads will cause some form of restrictions to be placed on your account... usually ghosting on any new ads. You think your ads are live and you can see them on their home page but they don't show up in the daily listings so no one ever sees any link to them .

Some times only a percentage of your ads are ghosted or certain categories are ghosted. Because of this I check all new ads to be sure they can be seen in the listings... if ghosted I go back a delete them. Never re-post a deleted ad that was originally ghosted. It will remain ghosted. You will need to create a brand new ad to replace it after a few days. If a new ad is "live" it will never be ghosted only deleted.

No matter how hard you try you will always have some flagging. Your goal is to keep it limited. Always go to the craig site and category you ad was flagged on. Get a feel for the local's style of posting and create a new ad that blends in. Sometimes just having a shorter title will stop the flagging. If you see no image ads just place a straight text ad. Blend in to the crowd, be a chameleon.

The main thing here is just accept the above liabilities and find workarounds... after all it is "free."

DO NOT COMPLAIN TO CRAIG OR GET INVOLVED IN THE FLAGING FORUM!

You will only draw unwanted attention to yourself being viewed as a trouble maker and get punished for it. Craig seldom if ever answers emails and only with very vague responses. Not worth the effort. If you get banned it is much easier to open a new account and start over. It is important to realize that a brand new craig account has a sort of grace period. No blocks, restrictions or ghosting so use with care and the account will remain useful for some time.

Well I hope I haven't scared you off but the short of it is to fly under the radar... if you don't promote it you don't have to defend it... (your posting habits, not your marketing offers).