I have been looking at the Job boards since January. It seems like in the last month or so the amount of horseshit spam on them has gone through the roof. It is getting posted faster than it can be flagged down. I know a few months back maybe one or two in ten were bs now its like 9/10.

They either need to start charging a nominal fee (like $1.00 or something) for the postings or lay the page out framed so you can click through them faster (like ms outlook reading pane) preferably both.

5/18/2008 4:29:09 PM

need a job?
I think I might have something for you

5/18/2008 4:30:18 PM

gross

5/18/2008 4:30:48 PM

Is there a browser plugin that would lay out the page so that I could click through them faster?

5/18/2008 4:33:21 PM

I'm really annoyed with this too. No matter how much of it I flag, there's still an incredible amount of BS on there.

Still need a job

5/18/2008 4:35:39 PM

I read something that said they were considering banning html or severely restricting its use. I don't know if that would fix the problem or not.

5/18/2008 4:40:05 PM

how do the spammers get pass the text coding box? Seems ever site that has that shit STILL has a ton of spam or bots.

5/18/2008 4:41:00 PM

I have no information to back this up, but I would assume they automate everything else and then just sit there and enter the codes (or pay some retard to). I mean that part only takes two seconds.

Even a .25 per ad charge would slow them down, also it would require a credit card number that could be banned or blocked. People may have access to infinite email or ip addresses but they are not gonna have access to infinite credit card numbers.

5/18/2008 4:44:03 PM

hmmm I was thinking they had some character recognition software that could outline the characters and tell what it was.. Why else would the characters be distorted sometimes.. as if to throw off the character recognition software...

5/18/2008 4:46:07 PM

OCR has advanced a lot in the last year. notably hotmail and gmail's captchas were recently bypassed by spammers

5/18/2008 4:48:02 PM

I am also job searching and its crazy how much spam is on there... what sucks is that most of it looks like its from the same couple sites posted over and over and over with different names.

5/18/2008 4:51:40 PM

that's too bad. i got my last job on CL, it was a MUCH better experience than using monster/dice/indeed/etc

5/18/2008 4:53:17 PM

fix it ken!
and find me a jarb!

5/18/2008 4:56:32 PM

Come work at Lifetouch dude.

5/18/2008 4:57:13 PM

hmmm...

5/18/2008 5:01:12 PM

I think facebook was really ahead of the curve when they started requiring a cell phone number (via text message verification) to register an account. It is like the last frontier of the internet that has not been bombarded by spammers. I do not think this would work for CL though.

5/18/2008 5:15:02 PM

they took our jobs!!!! DEE DE DEEEE!!!

5/18/2008 5:17:09 PM

that fb comment is a bit misguided

5/18/2008 5:17:13 PM

actually, the networks pages were pretty much swamped by spammers. part of the reason they took off the Networks link

5/18/2008 5:17:13 PM

zomg jinx

5/18/2008 5:17:42 PM

Oh I must have missed that.

5/18/2008 5:19:12 PM

Saw a thing on ESPN on ticket brokers and how their bots get past the text coding boxes. They've got a room in India where people sit and enter the text all day that works with their automatated ordering system.

5/18/2008 5:21:39 PM

yeah ticketmaster gets f-ed in the a by these guys

5/18/2008 5:22:27 PM

hahahaha In San Fransisco you do not see one spam ad on this page.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/rej/

The Job Ads there cost $75 each paid via credit card.

5/18/2008 5:25:07 PM

https://post.craigslist.org/sfo/J

Quote :

"Price: 75.00 per category selected"

they should implement this on TWW

5/18/2008 5:26:27 PM

it should cost a penny per post

and they should pay bonuses for the number of pages each thread reaches

that way threads wouldn't suck as much

5/18/2008 5:28:37 PM

yeah that might work if ReceiveDeath weren't around maybe

5/18/2008 5:30:41 PM

that'd be awesome.

1) make a joie thread
2) profit.

5/18/2008 5:39:03 PM

FYI, beating those Text verification boxes (they are called CAPTCHA's) is not too hard.

I wrote a captcha beater in an afternoon that was about 95% accurate

5/18/2008 5:51:34 PM

this is ghey

5/19/2008 8:24:37 AM

they charge in a few cities.

thats how they pay for the whole hting.

5/19/2008 8:27:35 AM

I dont know what they did but it looks to be fixed for the time being.

6/2/2008 10:23:15 PM

it was me. i've been doing A LOT of flagging

6/2/2008 10:28:17 PM

"Inside Craigslist's Increasingly Complicated Battle Against Spammers"

http://techdirt.com/articles/20080523/0327151211.shtml

saw this the other day actually

6/2/2008 10:28:56 PM

Quote :

""Spam on Craigslist has been a minor nuisance for years. Not any more. This year, the spammers started winning and are taking over Craigslist. Here's how they did it. Craigslist tries to stop spamming by checking for duplicate submissions. They check for excessive posts from a single IP address. They require users to register with a valid E-mail address. They added a CAPTCHA to stop automated posting tools. And users can flag postings they recognize as spam. Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism. Random text is added to each spam message to fool Craigslist's duplicate message detector. IP proxy sites are used to post from a wide range of IP addresses. E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator ("Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?") An OCR system reads the obscured text in the CAPTCHA. Automatic monitoring detects when a posting has been flagged as spam and reposts it. CL Auto Poster isn't the only such tool. Other desktop software products are AdBomber and Ad Master. For spammers preferring a service-oriented approach, there's ItsYourPost. With these power tools, the defenses of Craigslist have been overrun. Some categories on Craigslist have become over 90% spam. The personals sections were the first to go, then the services categories, and more recently, the job postings. Craigslist is fighting back. Its latest gimmick is phone verification. Posting in some categories now requires a callback phone call, with a password sent to the user either by voice or as an SMS message. Only one account is allowed per phone number. Spammers reacted by using VoIP numbers. Craigslist blocked those. Spammers tried using number-portability services like Grand Central and Tossable Digits. Craigslist blocked those. Spammers tried using their own free ringtone sites to get many users to accept the Craigslist verification call, then type in the password from the voice message. Craigslist hasn't countered that trick yet. Much of the back and forth battle can be followed in various forums. It's not clear yet who will win. Craigslist may find something that works. If it doesn't, however, it could be toast for the success story of Craigslist.""

6/2/2008 10:41:24 PM

i got a really awesome job from craigslist once

6/2/2008 10:42:35 PM

Quote :

"E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator"

i knew google was behind it somehow. they want craig's list so bad

6/2/2008 10:52:09 PM

ok so in todays news they have blocked godaddy.com email accounts.

7/11/2008 1:44:06 AM

what!?

you mean blahblah@godaddy.com

or do you mean blahblah@sitehostedbygodaddy.com

?

THIS IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS

7/11/2008 1:45:51 AM

blahblah@str8bacardilsdomainname.com

7/11/2008 1:55:15 AM

craigslist

it MUST be destroyed!

7/11/2008 2:01:50 AM

What the hell is going on with the jobs posted (here's an example) where, after you reply, you get an autoresponse saying 'apply here, at domain-that-google-or-WHOIS-can't-find-any-info-on'?

Something to note is they don't use the anonymized emails - an attempt to seem more legit?

The first time, I replied with something like 'I'm sure you'll understand why I'm hesitant to put all my contact info onto a strange, unverified third-party site*. Would you please either call my cell, or email me back about this?'
* the undertone being 'I already sent you my resume.'

Nothing.

Happened again today. Of course, I haven't gotten a reply

7/15/2008 1:56:56 PM