Bye Bye Craigslist

Re:Bye Bye Craigslist by sprokolopolis on Sunday June 24, 2012 @04:07AM (#4152887)

Just because the site is simple in design, doesn't mean that it is built to be used efficiently. Craigslist, as is, is a usability nightmare. When I use the site, I am using it with various Greasemonkey scripts, Firefox extensions and 3rd party web apps to make their content easier to consume/see/understand/filter. These tools are the only reason that I can bare to use Craigslist.

If I am searching for a bike, a simple script to show image thumbnails by every listing will let me see which listings interest me. This saves me time, because now I only have to open a few interesting links. I don't have to scour through many of text links, just to see if they interest me.

The rentals section is constantly bombarded by spam and has very few filtering options. There is no way to exclude keywords. Boolean operators would greatly improve the usability of the site.

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Re:Bye Bye Craigslist by prophetjohn on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:55AM (#4160366)

You can exclude keywords and there is a boolean OR operator: |

The problem is that you have to enter some search query before you can use the negation operator.

Also, protip to get past the spam in rentals section (Austin is holy crap bad about this): enter 'google' as your search term. This will only return ads that have an address specified and hence have the 'google maps' links. Plus, since you've entered a search term, you can filter out the locator who keeps spamming and screwing up your search by putting his phone number in the address section.

Here's a query I might have used during my last apartment search.

    google downtown | central -"512-555-5555" -"CALL NOW" -"austin apartments NOW"

etc.

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