Craigslist (stylized as Craigslist) is an American classifieds advertising website. The site mainly has a section dedicated to jobs, housing, for sale, essentials, services, community service, gigs, resumes and also a discussion forum.
Craig Newmark initially started the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area. It later became a web-based service in 1996 and expanded into other classifieds. It began expanding to other US and Canadian cities in 2000 and currently covers more than 70 countries.
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What is Craigslist (stylized as Craigslist)?
Craigslist is a popular website for viewing and posting local ads. It works much like the classifieds section of a newspaper and is completely free to use. That means you can use it for free.
Most of the Internet users looking for casual dating pleasure online, who depended on Craigslist personals as their online dating solution. However, since the popular dating site is no more, many find the best alternatives to the once great dating website. It is worth noting here that Craigslist was very popular at one time but it never became as popular as Walled. But it is still very popular in some countries.
As such, unsurprisingly, the results show five of the most populous cities in the country In order of most visits, sites in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago saw the most traffic during Alexa's three-month data collection period.
What not to do when using Craigslist?
If you're a Craigslist user, there are a few things to watch out for. Avoid adding any personal information to postings here, including your name, real phone number or real email address.
Remember, always use generated email addresses in your Craigslist posts. Because it generates a random email address, the poster doesn't have your original email in the file.
6 Ways to Avoid Craigslist Scams
There are a lot of great resources available on Craigslist, and if you have stuff you don't need, you can make good money selling it here. Unfortunately, though, Craigslist is riddled with scammers. Follow these seven tips to keep your money safe while using the popular online. Here are 6 ways to avoid this scam on Craigslist.
1. Get to know Craigslist the right way
Many Craigslist scams can be avoided by knowing some basic information about the site:
** The Craigslist URL is
https://www.craigslist.org/. Scammers often create sites that look like Craigslist to lure buyers into paying for items that don't actually exist. So always confirm the URL before finalizing a purchase.
**Craigslist does not back any transactions on its site. If you are offered purchase protection at a price, be sure you are looking at a scam.
2. Be sure to deal locally
It is always safer to finalize a transaction in person. Dealing with locals also reduces the likelihood of a language barrier obscuring the details of a contract.
3. Check the product before finalizing a sale
Don't rely on pictures alone when buying something on Craigslist. Ask to see the item in person.
4. Never accept or send a cashier's check, certified check or money order as payment
It is best to pay for online items purchased from remote and unknown sellers using a credit card. Likewise, you can always contest the charge if sales go south.
And if you pay by cashier's check, certified check, or money order, there's no way to reclaim your funds if the need arises. That means you will not get your cash back.
5. Use Cash - Safely
If you're dealing with locals, the safest way to pay for or collect Craigslist transactions is to accept cash. To make it more secure, you can exchange at a safe place like your local police station or even Acclaim FCU.
Also, bring a counterfeit detection pen to make sure you're not getting scammed with fake bills.
6. Never share your personal information
A buyer or seller on Craigslist has no reason to know your checking account number, your date of birth, or the name of the high school you attended. If a contact asks too many personal questions, back off the deal. It is much safer for you.
History of Craigslist
People are helping each other in friendly, social and trusted community ways on the Internet through WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and after feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events.
And in early 1995, he started an email distribution list of friends. Most of the initial postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software and Internet developers living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The number of subscribers and posts increased rapidly through manual advertising. There was no moderation and Newmark was surprised when people started using the mailing list for non-event posts. People trying to fill technical roles have found that list serves are a good way to reach people with the skills they've found.
As a result job category has been added to it. The category list has grown a lot due to user demand for more categories. Initially the technology faced some limitations, so in June 1995 Majordomo was installed and the "Craiglist" mailing list was re-launched. Community members started requesting a web interface Newmark registered "craigslist.org" and the website went live in 1996.
In the fall of 1998, the name "List Foundation" was introduced, and Craigslist began using this name. In April 1999, when Newmark learned of other organizations called the "List Foundation", use of the name was dropped. Craigslist was incorporated in 1999 as a private, for-profit company. During these events, Newmark realized that the site was growing so fast that he could stop working as a software engineer and devote his full attention to running Craigslist. In April 2000, Newmark's San Francisco apartment had nine employees working.
In January 2000, current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as lead programmer and CTO. Buckmaster contributed architecture to the multi-city site, search engine, discussion forum, reporting system, self-posting process, homepage design, personal categories, and Craigslist's best features. He was promoted to CEO in November 2000.
The site expanded to nine more US cities in 2000, four each in 2001 and 2002, and 14 cities in 2003. On August 1, 2004, Craigslist began charging a $25 fee to post job openings on its New York and Los Angeles pages. On the same day, a new category called "Gigs" was added, where low-cost, unpaid jobs were posted for free.
In March 2008, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese became the first non-English languages Craigslist supported. As of August 9, 2012, Craigslist sites were active in over 700 cities and towns in 70 countries. Some Craigslist sites cover large regions rather than individual metropolitan areas—for example, the US states of Delaware and Wyoming, the Western Slope of Colorado, the Gold Country of California, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Craigslist sites for some major cities, such as Los Angeles, included the ability for the user to focus on a specific area of a city (such as central Los Angeles).
Source: Wikipedia
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