A week or so ago I wrote about some of the issues Craigslist was dealing with from marketers and spammers.  Because of the format of the site and the ability to post just about anything on the extremely popular classified listing service, people have been posting bogus and commercial listings at an increasing rate.  The Craigslist community isn't taking kindly to the abuse of their beloved service and movements to deal with the rising instance of posts that violate the site's terms of service have been gaining momentum.

I stumbled across a ClickZ report today detailing some of the steps the Craigslist team has been taking to fight back.

According to Craig Newmark, founder of the service, he and his team of customer support staff have started going to ISPs, the police, and the Craigslist community at large to help fight the potentially destructive use of the service by spammers and zealous marketers.  Newmark and 9 other staff members submit reports to ISPs about users that are engaging in abusive tactics on the site.  And although some ISPs are more responsive than others, Newmark says the tactic has been working well.

In addition to contacting ISPs, Craigslist stays in contact with various cyber-specific police forces and units to report abuse.  Newmark goes on to say that some of these police forces take a proactive approach and regularly contact the site to talk about violations.

And as always, the Craigslist community is often the first line of defense against malicious users.  The site employs a flagging system that lets users flag abusive or fraudulent posts as such.  Once a post has received a certain number of flags, it is removed automatically by the system.  That magic number of removal is changed on a regular basis to prevent people from abusing it to remove posts that don't really violate the terms of the service.

Still thinking about using Craigslist as a marketing site?  I've said it before and I'll say again:  Craigslist is not a marketing site.  If legitimate marketers are careless enough to intentionally violate a site's terms of service, they deserve to have their ISPs and the police contacted.  The fewer people out there ruining the name of marketing for all of us, the better.