Craigslist is a popular classified advertisements website in the United States. It has been operating since 1995 and is named after its founder, Craig Newmark. This is a kind of a catalog, where you can find ads on various topics like jobs, housing, items for sale, services etc. This is also the place to connect with like-minded people.
Currently, the platform is in demand in over 70 countries, while the catalog interface is available in 15 languages. It has a presence in almost every part of the world, including the US, Asia, Oceania, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. According to Similarweb, the website traffic exceeds 210 million unique visits per month. It is included in the list of top 100 largest websites in the world and this is also one of the top 20 largest classified ad platforms in the United States. The project directly competes with such services as eBay, OLX, and Amazon.
No wonder, Craigslist has its own system of anti-bot and anti-spam protection, taking into account its extensive reach.
We will further the reasons and situations when the platform blocks the IP addresses of its users and we will also provide information on what to do if your IP or account gets banned.
Reasons Why Craigslist May Block Your IP
Craigslist down? Reasons for that may be numerous. It’s no secret that a large audience is a great responsibility. Craigslist is an ideal platform for advertising and promoting your products or services. It also provides market analysis information, contact details of potential clients, the ability to scrape ads for your local catalog etc. Users may have various tasks and goals. However, some of them may not align with the platform's rules. Therefore, Craigslist combats parasitic load and actively blocks the IP addresses of clients who potentially violate the policy of fair interaction with the platform.
- Local and Regional Blocking
No matter how large Craigslist is, this is just a website. Thus, it can be blocked according to local policies and rules. For example, these may include country-wide or regional blocks, or just local security policies that prohibit users from accessing certain websites in the network. Such local policies may be used within companies (in their corporate networks), educational institutions (schools, universities, campus networks etc.), as well as in various government agencies (government bodies, municipal services, judicial and executive authorities etc.).
- Private and Public Networks
Sometimes, you may be using the internet not from your own IP address but from a shared one. For example, this may happen when you connect to websites (including Craigslist) through Wi-Fi in a café, from a reception area of any company etc.
It's also possible that your internet service provider assigns the same IP address to multiple users at a time (these are called rotating gray IPs). Your neighbor, for instance, may connect to your Wi-Fi access point because you forgot to set a password for the network etc. There are multiple examples of public networks out there.
If even one participant violates the rules of the Craigslist platform, other users (including innocent ones), will no longer be able to directly access the Craigslist website.
- Violation of Service Rules>
This includes all general provisions regarding the website’s rules of conduct. For example, aggressive communication, attempts to post ads with prohibited content (products and services that cannot be distributed through websites), spam, SEO links etc.
These are the actions that may violate legal requirements and the rights of other people. That is why it is crucial to find out how to post on Craigslist in advance.
Mind that such blockings are usually applied to user accounts rather than to IP addresses.
- Use of Automation Tools
This category includes actions that create a parasitic load on the platform. For example, attempts to parse web pages (learn more about what parsing is as well as the difference between web scanning and web scraping), frequent access to website pages (artificial inflation of views to bring a Craigslist posting to the top), attempts to post a large number of ads within a short period of time (the allowed frequency is 1 ad in 1 category and 1 city within 48 hours, with a total amount of messages not exceeding 10 posts per day) as well as posting the same ads in different cities and countries etc.
Many of these actions are specified in the Craigslist terms of use. However, it is more about automated blocks, not manual ones, so this point is discussed separately.
As a result, specialized protection algorithms block the IP address from which undesirable actions were performed, rather than a user account.
The work of viruses is a specific type of automation, when an infected computer is used as a starting point for spam distribution, parsing or automated ad posting on Craigslist.
Mind that business users may consciously violate the platform's rules because existing tech restrictions prevent them from servicing sales with the required efficacy. This is a justified risk. Thus, they have to complete certain actions to bypass Craigslist's security systems. These actions may include:
- proxy server lists;
- parsing programs;
- auto posting tools;
- Etc.
Craigslist uses a model of pre-calculated damages. This is when the service initially specifies in the agreement the amount of penalties (payments) users will be charged for specific actions (violations). The amounts may range from $1 to $3,000. For example, sending unwanted messages may incur a fee of $25 per each post, visiting more than 1,000 pages per day may cost $0.25 per page etc.
What To Do If Only Your Craigslist Account Is Blocked
The Craigslist security system initially issues warnings to users in the form of red flags. If the number of flags increases, the account gets blocked.
On one hand, you can try getting in touch with the customer support team via live chat, email or phone. The specialists will review the situation on an individual basis.
In practice, however, the customer support team considers the block justified in around 99% of cases. Therefore, it will be easier and faster to create a new account and repost your ad, taking into consideration previous mistakes.
It is more challenging to bypass IP blocking.
How to Unblock Your Craigslist Account
In addition to direct IP blockings and account suspensions, Craigslist sometimes uses a non-standard approach known as a "shadow account" (Craigslist Ghosting). This occurs when a user can perform various actions after logging in, but none of the messages is visible to other website participants. This is an original solution to prevent spam and bots.
Despite these intricate measures, there is a single solution to these problems - using a new account registered with a new IP address.
There are different ways to get a new IP address. They are reviewed in detail in the following articles:
If you have been banned from Craigslist, you have several options to solve the problem. Proxy rent is the simplest and the most cost-effective solution.
The final connection scheme to Craigslist will involve a mediator (proxy server), but this will eventually help solve numerous problems:
- Proxies make it possible to create any number of Craigslist accounts - for example, one per city;
- You can gather information from web pages and complete parsing at a high speed;
- You can bypass restrictions on message limits per day by posting from different accounts and addresses;
- You can reduce the risk of individual account suspensions (if there are many accounts, the loss of one or two is not quite significant).
Where to Get Proxies for Craigslist?
Froxy makes it possible to rent rotating mobile and residential proxies with payment based on traffic packages.
These are the best proxies for many business tasks.
You get access to a vast pool of IP addresses from all over the world: over 8.5 million IPs, 200+ locations, precise targeting up to the city. Additionally, you can filter the search by specific internet service providers.
Proxy lists are exported in various formats, making it easy to connect them to professional software for posting, parsing and other tasks.
