Craigslist frustrations

Do you ever put an ad on Craigslist then it just disappears, only to reappear later? It's happened to me several times now.

I just listed a pot belly piglet and expected to get a response - usually ads bring at least 7 queries. Nada. So I looked and couldn't find my ad.

The people set up to pick up other pigs were all no-shows (3 in a row!), and I started wondering what was going on - it went from mine was 1 of 4 ads for pigs in the morning to my (maybe disappearing) ad was one of around 30 by evening. The other folks came out of the woodwork so I guess my buyers decided to shop around.

One fellow said he'd send me a certified check and it was obviously a fill-in-the-blank email he uses lots - my first time to encounter that scam, where I guess they're fishing for your bank account info. or something.

Is there a better way to sell animals? I'm tempted to take some in to the next auction - they've gone for about what I'm asking and none of the no-show hassles, tho they do get exposed to germs there and are handled very roughly.

Some of the less scrupulous sellers will flag all the other ads for the same thing they are trying to sell, just to make their stuff appear better. And sometimes you will have a PETA person on a mission that will flag any animal ad.

You can try the local free paper (thrifty nickel, etc.) or local AM radio farm stations. We also had a local "swap and talk" group on facebook. And you can still hang ads at the coffee shops, farm stores, and gas stations.

Most people I know that do a lot of little CL ads have gone to a second "burn phone" and email for the ads. It is a prepaid phone with no ties to anything else they do and a gmail with zero personal info. And meet up in public places--which is fine for some things, but not really handy for things bigger than a breadbox--or alive.

Here in Maine there's a weekly publication called Uncle Henry's, where near everything is bought and sold, animals and livestock included. Always surprised there isn't such a thing in every state, been useful for long before craigslist.

try
http://claz.org/classifieds/for-sale/animals-pets
there is scum / spam filters. Can help ..

Wow, thank you! I've looked at some others but they didn't seem to get a lot of traffic. That one has 287 ads posted for the nearest town!

It sent me a link and said to click it to confirm so the ad would go live - I clicked it and it just kept saying pending confirmation - I must be missing something else I need to do - ?

I was recently in Maine and was really impressed. It's been only about five years since I had been there but I noticed that it seems to be resilient in the face of corporate junk more than some other places. Uncle Henry's sounds good to me. Is it on paper?

Around here word of mouth is worth a lot. Do you frequent farmers markets? Making friends with farmers is fun and entertaining, and if the connections build networks it's beneficial for everyone.

I have this idea that the most valuable commodities are human ideas and friendships.

I'll second the local facebook swap/shop groups. You'll be dealing with people locally and have a better chance at getting responses from legit buyers. We are almost ready to give up CL altogether in favor of these groups.

I lived in Utah for a few months and quickly noticed how great their Craigslist alternative was. It was called KSL, and correlated to a TV station in the area - http://www.ksl.com/
It doesn't appear to be an outfit like NBC/CBS etc, so that is nice..

I do have to agree with the above that it would be great to have a local listing site for a town, though where I live in Colorado it may be better to have the listings on the county scale due to low-ish population density.

Matu, yep it started off as a weekly print publication and still is but they have a website too: http://unclehenrys.com/. An issue is $2 and in the back is a form to place two 30 word ads. Pre-internet it was the place to look for nearly anything and thankfully issues haven't gotten too much thinner over the years, despite the competition online.