Technical look at flagging

Our software is Auto Flagging software, with Ad Removal techniques ~ Not, Auto Ad Removal Software. There is no such thing as a push button auto ad removal software. (there is one person claiming he has this automatic ad removal software, and its a fake and a lie, this scam has caused some confusion for some people) If you want to use our software to remove ads, you will need to learn the techniques required to do so first.

What does it take to remove ads? More than one user, from more than one location within 50 miles of the target ad. How many users depends on the strength of the account that posted it.

So what is the main overall technique you need to learn to remove ads? You need to learn how to fool Craigslist into believing you are more than one user within 50 miles of the target ad. You will use the very same techniques to post from a variety of accounts without getting softblocked or banned as well.

3 Techniques to Fool Craigslist:

To master Craigslist, you will need to master each of these techniques, and employ them all to some degree to determine your VPS needs. In the end, you want to sit back in your easy chair, and just push the button like in the videos and make the ads vanish. But to have this level of control, you will have a VPS behind you, or a suitable pool of WiFi access points to jump in and out of as described in our wardiriving without driving section. With our CraigsFlagger Pro Software, CraigsFlagger Pro is just the software, but you must learn, understand and apply these tutorials with or without our software.

All that said, many of you (most of you), just get a cheap subscription to HMA and the ads you targeting are so weak because the person’s account who is posting them is junk because they have abused the Craigslist TOU that they vanish with just a few flags from a couple of IP’s. However, your targets wise up eventually, and you need to keep turning up the power to shut them down. Slowly, continue to learn each method until you’re running your VPS like a pro, and making it look easy. Once you know how, it really is very simple. Within our tutorials you will find more than a dozen more subtle techniques to drastically improve your Craigslist experience in all areas.

A few beginner tips:

1) Log out of Craigslist, and clear all the Craigslist cookies from your browser, once. Use our free CraigsCookies plugin, you may just want to go to Tools>Options>Privacy and remove individual cookies.

2) Don’t touch the cookies ever again while flagging!! Our program ejects the bad cookies, and requests new flagging cookies. You need the correct cookies to flag, leave that to our program. If you want to reload cookies after changing IP’s, click the reload button, and it will put the correct cookies for that ip into your browser.

3) You can flag each ad 4 times from each clean ip/access point. This is why we have our 4x option, so wardrivers are not wasting their time counting the cycles. To make this obvious, wardriving, or vps is the only way to access a clean ip. People use HMA or free proxies despite this, and have varying results. In the end, HMA, although it does work well in some cities, is the same price as 5 clean IP’s on your own private VPS

4) When wardriving, you can only access the access point while you are in range of that access point. You cannot use the ip later on when you’re out of range, it’s just an access point, not a proxy server. A proxy server allows you to use the ip of it’s host machine.

5) You need from one to 33 working IP’s to flag an ad. Flag each ad 4 times from each IP. The threshold depends on how new the account is, and how spammy their ads are. If the ads are not coming down, your IP’s are not clean enough (Craigslist already banned them for misuse), or close enough (50 miles), see step three.

6) You are flagging two things, their account, and their ad. The more flags an account takes, the easier all the ads generated by it come down. You begin to weaken the overall flagging threshold. So, flag the old ads too, it will make their new ads less difficult to take down over time.

7) You can flag all ads another 4 times after 24 hours as well in most cities, in most sections. Keep in mind, the older an ad is, the more flags it takes to remove it as well, unless the account is weak, or it is collecting flags from other as well.

8) If you flag more than 50 ads from the same IP in one 24 hour period, that IP will no longer count as a valid source of flags, and any accounts associated with that IP may be softblocked.

9) You can recover the ad number from the search page with our flagging software. In the search box you can enter these numbers separated by the pipe symbol ( | ) and search an example of this is like so: 6725740556 | 6730782191 | 6730756770  If these ads still exist, and are close enough to the area from where you are currently searching, they will come up all on the same page regardless of what sections they are in. You can then flag them all from the same tab.

*Note: These ad numbers must be from sections of the same CL website, or one that is very near or it wont show those which are too far from the home page of the search page. Craigslist defeated all the other software flaggers which exclusively used ad numbers to flag. Our technology uses their own website, which is why it has been working since 2010 through 2026. If you don’t open the ad from within Craigslist, as our software does (check the preview feature to see it in action) then the ad cannot be flagged at all. All these defunct desktop flaggers won’t work for this reason.

Here is the idea behind revolving your IP’s with our IP revolver programs:

Getting more in Depth:

To be able to flag effectively (or even at all), you need to understand how Craigslist works a little bit. Flagging is geo ip specific. Just like posting, you need to have an ip address within 50 miles of the area the ad you want to flag is posted in. You should understand the difference between an ip and a subnet to begin with. You used to be able to flag from different ip addresses and get results.

Years ago, a person could change the mac address on their machine’s modem, and reboot their cable router and there you go, a different ip address, and flag and clear your cookies 4 X, and do it again. 60 times.. (this trick still works sometimes but only against people with softblocked accounts BWT but don’t expect it to work today) You now must use different subnets to flag from. This is similar to the ip address, but with a much further space between similar addresses. To find out the difference between an ip address and a subnet, please look over the ghosting section, we go into that in much greater detail in that tutorial.

The next principal you must understand is that Craigslist is a massive database. The user actually sees very little of the entire website. If you saw everything, it would be a jumble of useless information. So you are given a panel, a search box, search results. An account with a few options. Part of the database keeps logs. A big part. People fail to realize how adaptive and combative CL can be.

Section Differences

The average user is deterred from abusing the system, because their ip is watched by the database bots and administrators for “bad” behavior and points, (threshold is weakened) are removed for TOU infractions. Your account is linked to your ip by the database. Your account has a unique “flagging threshold” (the number of flags it takes to delete one of your posts). Your flagging threshold depends on a number of variables. What section did you place your ad in, does that section have a current or recent “flagging war” going on? (higher threshold) Do many commercial advertisers in that section anger the CL admins with their behavior? (lower threshold) I’m going to explain how your account works so you can effectively understand your opponent and use this software effectively and understand the facts from fiction. I will dispel the dis-information and outdated information about ghosting, etc. When you understand how to flag an opponent effectively, you will also understand how to prevent ghosting and reduced threshold penalties affecting your business. You’re getting two sides of the coin for the same price, but you must know all the little nuances involved in flagging before you know how to post a strong flag resistant ad. The same information is at play both ways.

Craigslist USA and Craigslist Canada are two very different operations. Each site has different moderators, limits and thresholds. Each city is like apples and oranges, they are different from each other in this respect. In Canada the rules are much more strict, there are many more volunteers. It is also much more difficult to find proxies, clean or otherwise. Very little that you read about from an American perspective applies to Canada. Where are Canadians going to find their IP’s? Hide my IP? $105 per year for one useable IP? Do you think CL didn’t buy that same service just to see what they were and ban them? Yes, they did, and wonderproxy too. This is the same with all the smaller countries and towns. People trying to post and flag excessively in these smaller places are like fish in a barrel with very few IP’s to switch to and from. Unless you know how to make a VPS proxy server, or you are willing to wardrive, you might have been stuck following what they want or organizing a flagging group. Any proxy with a novelty referrer will be instantly banned along with the account using it.

Wardriving

Here is what we used to do when we designed this system. There were tons of ads to bring down, hundreds. Not flagging, bringing them down, clearing whole sections again and again.. We needed to test Craigslist to make sure our techniques worked, and to send a message to those who had it coming. So, we set it up in a car on a laptop. After work we would go out late at night when there was no traffic downtown. We would drive one block on the main street, check for open access points.. jump on any open ones one at a time. If its Starbucks, we would sign in, Safeway etc.. sign in. We would flag everyone in the sections we were clearing except us. Drive another block, switch access points. Do it again. And again. Block by block for 80 blocks we would do it.

We would gain WiFi access to every bar, restaurant etc. The next time we did it.. the pc would just jump on the different programed in access points by its self, because it was all programed in from the last drive. We would bring everyone down by beating their accounts to death, new ads and the old. The next time, it was much easier to bring our targets down. We only needed the office ip, and a couple of coffee shops for most of them. We used our modified satellite dish for those, and didn’t even need to leave the office to keep the whole section under control. After a few weeks go by, the gang we are flagging reads up on why they can’t keep an ad up anymore, and most fixed their accounts by getting brand new ones. So, then every couple of weeks, we would need to go for a long drive to put them back in their place, and punch holes in all their new accounts. We would go through the neighborhoods as well, getting 4 or 5 ip’s at a time from apartment towers and making new routs across the city as we went. Soon, the whole city was programed in to our little wardriver laptop.

VPS

But, this is just one way to do things. These days we use a custom made vps and Foxy Revolver, and we don’t need to leave the office to put a dent in our targets. You might like to use HMA instead. There are many ways to skin this cat. What works today might not work tomorrow.. “it was working great, then it stopped! Why?” Because your target got wise and got a new account, (just like you did right?). Now you need to wardrive to knock him off in real time, or let your flags accumulate over a week or two to break his account down slowly over time.

What does Craigslist want? Well, they don’t want you to run a profitable Craigslist business from their site. They don’t want anyone running a Craigslist based business except them. Ok, you have a difference of opinion already. How do they prevent this? They lower your flagging threshold for cross posting to multiple different sections. But they are even more specific than that. If you post ads in sections to buy vehicles, and you then use the same account to post ads to sell vehicles.. they have decided you are a “curber” and they will lower your threshold dramatically, or just have the bot ghost you altogether. If you post from one neighborhood or municipality to another, gotcha! Commercial activity alert goes off, and you’re a ghost. Once your account is getting ghosted, its over for that account, and that email, and perhaps in extreme cases your ip as well. You may get 5 accounts blown before your ip must be changed as well. Even if it works intermittently, they have put it through an algorithm to toy with you and waste your time with fake verifications etc. If they ask you to re verify an account, don’t bother, it’s already over. Open a brand new one, they are just trying to trick you into wasting a perfectly good phone number. Their database will taint the new one as well if you re-verify with a new number.

Bulletproof ADS

In Craigslist, most everyone is spamming, so they are softblocked, and using old accounts. Why some persons ads cannot be removed is simple beyond belief. They post only 2 ads per day per account, per ip. They follow the rules. And then use a different company name, different title, phone number, different account, different ip to do the same thing if they want to spam and get away with it. So how do people break down a bulletproof ad then?  Possibly the person flagging has access to unlimited ip’s because he works in a different place with wifi every day. He has access to all the local hotspots during his daily commute, and he just has to wardrive down the main street with our software on the way to and or from work, and pound the accounts until they “pop”. Once he busts someone’s accounts, he can wipe them out in every section easily from home, all the ads posted by the blown account now come down with just a few flags when the account has been blown. Its automatic, the threshold has been lowered, and will not raise again.

Maybe you can reason with Craigslist. Perhaps. My first contact with them was regarding their policy to allow 6 of my competitors to flag my ads off every day. I told them I can see the logs, I can see they each flag my ad 4 times, and after 6 of them have done this, my ad was gone. I explained that I’m trying to run a business, and this is really unfair of them to allow my competition remove the food right off my table. They didn’t respond in a email, they ghosted all of my ads, past and present, and blew my account so I couldn’t post from it any more. I don’t ask them why anymore. I developed this solution. Go ahead and email them. See what happens.

Rumors and Facts

Flagging Threshold. The average threshold for a new account in a noncommercial area is 22 flags. Does this mean 22 unique IP’s? Yes, and no. There are certain people that have learned the trick about flagging, clearing the cookies, reload the page and flag again. So, if 6 people attack your ad in this way, its likely it will come down. In commercial sections, and personals it takes many more flags to bring an ad down. Why? Because everyone takes the personals personal. And so many competitors compete by tearing the competition down. If CL didn’t raise the flagging threshold of these areas, they would be a blank page. But you still get flagged in these areas.. this is because you have a weak account, more likely from cross posting than cross dressing.

What is the standard threshold of a protected area? About 60 flags, as high as 240. This means 15 to 60 unique computers flagging 4 times each! There is no magic way to flag without a local ip. Software claiming they can is totally false. The database ignores your flag if you do not have a local IP. Flag it anyway, but you’re just shooting blanks if you have used your ip to flag an ad 4 times, or if your IP isn’t local. In the sections that still allow html to be used, if you want to know exactly how many flags it takes to rip an ad down from your account in those sections, put a tracker in an ad, and write in all caps you flaggers will never shut me down! Watch how many times your ad is visited before it disappears. Now you know how many proxies you will need to do the same. (unless your account has an even lower threshold because of constant flagging, or abuse of the CL TOU)

In the proxy section, we go into how to find or create unlimited fresh useable IP’s in your area in a number of ways. We also provide links to the tools and supporting software you might like to make things easier. (for those of you with entitlement issues, if you find you are in need of third party applications or services to fulfill your needs, we do not offer other people’s paid software for free because you bought CraigsFlagger Pro. This comes only with what is shown in the fancy chart in the store. And just because you bought one piece of software from us, does not mean you are entitled to have everything we have created for free)

Our flagging software cuts down the amount of tedious effort it takes to open each ad, flag it, back up your browser, delete cookies, reload, open the ad, flag again.. Its all automated. One search, one click. Go have coffee.. surf the net in another tab. Or open another Craigslist window, make a different search, and click the flag 4 X button after you have eliminated all your own ads and your friendly competition form the list. Open as many robots in as many tabs as you want. There is no limit to how many ads one ip can flag 4 X. I have personally had over 500 ads in multiple tabs open and flagged them all off, even in a flagging war with the Craigslist admins involved raising the threshold as I eliminated everyone and the complained. As their account pops, you will see groups of the ads all disappear at the same time, as all the ads generated by the popped account go down at once.

Most times when flagging, you are shown the success popup, the pirate flag, when the ad has finally been flagged, but sometimes in the last year, we are noticing, Craigslist is just deleting the ad later on, but only after you stop flagging or visiting the ads. So you can keep flagging it, and it stays there, so it looks like you haven’t succeeded. But if you stop for 20 minutes, refresh your page, look just how many have now disappeared. This is their effort to make us think we have no effect. But obviously if we select dozens of targets, and flag them multiple times, then those specific targets are gone 20 minutes after we stop flagging them again and again it is us, they just are not letting us take the credit instantly. It’s part of their psychological defense tactics against the flagging we do.

Each Account plays by its own rules

We have also noticed that you can sometimes use as little as 4 or 5 IP’s (subnets) and give it a break for a couple hours, then run another cycle, flag 4X from each. This can pull down some ads in some sections. Especially in the main general section. It seems that they are resetting our threshold after a couple of hours and allowing our subnets another 4 flags. Remember, we do not know every single trick to their database, you may still find patterns of success by experimenting. Some of your targets cross post, post in different commercial and non commercial sections, post commercial keywords in their titles etc, and they make it easy for you to beat up their ads. If you give each ad a flag you don’t like automatically, imagine, 30 ads per tab 4 tabs = 120 ads being flagged every 5 minutes = 1440 ads flagged each hour. This amounts to 34560 ads being flagged per 24 hours. But.. each flag performs 6 server requests to flag the ad from the proper referrer. This amounts to 207,360 server requests.

There are internal overload mechanisms that their server uses to protect itself from DOS attacks. If you can convince the server that your targets are the cause of a major bandwidth drain, a separate system can forcefully do one of a few things, ban your ip and ignore all your requests, (Never happened yet, even after a hundred million flags!) or, more likely the server will eject the ad so your bot stops hitting their server. We are always doing more experiments and testing different theories. As we discover new holes, we will adjust our tutorial. Hundreds of millions of automated flags does give us a unique flagging perspective. Your feed back is also appreciated as well. We will never be able to have an open forum here for obvious reasons, but once we lock on to a new discovery, we make it known to our members.

We have flagged thousands of ads and eventually, you notice a pattern. The really old ads can take 60 IP’s to remove. This means 4 X 60 = 240 flags. Craigslist algorithm adjusts because they think if it has been around for a week, it must be “safe”. Also, the ads in the services sections can take 60 ip’s to remove because they want to make sure we don’t go to 10 coffee shops every day and rule our little section like bullies, and cause Craigslist to be flooded with complaints. Yesterday’s ads are less important to everyone, the customer, the poster, and Craigslist, so they can come down with 30. But, here’s the fun part.. the people you are likely to go after have violated many of the tou of Craigslist, and as such, have weakened accounts. They are very susceptible to the 60 second head shot. Some times you can bring these guys down with one IP, between one and 3 flags if you’re fast. Its a little “gift” Craigslist has built in to their system to enable the seasoned flaggers to decimate the seasoned spammers. The first 5 minutes, 8 to 12 flags from 4 different IP’s, and as the ad ages over the day, it begins to get much stronger much quicker after that.

Softblock their account

They want to make it easy for the obvious spam to be removed, and nearly impossible for a legitimate post. When you leave all your old ads up, you enable someone to attack not just your ad, but the account its self. There is a different threshold for getting their account softblocked. Once their account takes a certain amount of hits on every ad they place, you cause their account to generate weaker and weaker ads. (softblocked) Search for every single ad they have placed, old or new. Flag it. This adds up over time. Do this every 24 hours usually, the flagging resets after 24 hours. On the other hand, if you want to protect your new account from a swarm of flaggers using this tactic, you will remove your old ads every day, change the titles every day, and sometimes even post a fake ad, then change it a couple of hours later to your true ad. This way your ad gains strength with hours passed, and the flaggers just keep scanning the top of the list for you. They don’t go back over ads they think they looked at already. You can also do tiny edits every so oftenn through the day, one word only in a title, one phrase only in the ad. This resets the flagging threshold in most cases! Only to a point though. Edit it too many times, and it will get you ghosted, removed or softblocked. It depends if the Craigslist admin catches you, or if you do it too often. I wouldn’t try it more than 3 times per ad per day.

Every single account is its own Craigslist experience. You need to just take a drive, and find out just what kind of beast you’re really dealing with. The 60 headed hydra account, or something more manageable like a 10 flag softblocked account. If you want to be in full control of your section, you need to be prepared to take on the hydra. 60 IP’s, 4 flags each, for every tough account you want to “pop“. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, once you pop them, they are weaker and weaker until you just have to do it once from home, once on the way to work, and once at the coffee shop. Until they get wise, they will be as easy to push over as that. As they go broke or get frustrated, they begin to seek advice and study online. They will eventually discover that their account is softblocked, and get a new one. Its quite possible they will make a mistake, or series of them that will just get them softblocked again. You’re not the only one that notices that they have a weak account though. Your mutual competitors will occasionally get the winning flag, even though you did all the work, and they will mistakenly believe they can rip them down by repeating that, so they do, and it helps your cause.

Once there is blood in the water, everyone joins the attack, and if you all keep it up, they will not be able to generate a tough account weather they follow the tou or not. There is an ebb and flow to this, and a psychological factor, and the algorithm. If you really need to control the section, take a wardrive, check the pulse, and crawl inside of this problem. I used to go once a week and wardrive to all the great multiple hotspots I had already located around the city, blow all their accounts from 30 to 60 different IP’s, then I could handle them from my local coffee shop and neighborhood for another week until they got wise. If you make over a grand a day, hiring someone to go around for a hundred bucks a day is nothing.

Dialup

Another proven method is to use aol dial up accounts. You just keep dialing up on your modem with a number from that city, and flag 4X then you hang up and dial again. These dial up ISPs sometimes even have multiple phone numbers in the same city. This will ensure you are getting a different subnet each time, not just another ip in the same subnet. This method works wonders if there are dial up ISP’s in your area. Get accounts with all of them. We hope this demystifies the Craigslist database and it’s bots for you.

How to test the software if you’re really in a panic and you need to cause a full effect in your section..

You want to go from shop to shop on the main streets, program your laptop.. all the WiFi’s. All the Starbucks, all the hotspots. Then once you’re all programmed with 30 different access points in your laptop.. you can control the entire section. Just drive down the road, park on each block for a few minutes, and erase them all, even go back in time, and erase all the old ads, punish the actual account, not just the ads. Then do a few passes in the other sections you know they are also in, watch them all fall down. Tell no one. Let them speculate, guess.. accuse, and they will respond the only way they know how, the will flag each other to death. This will save you lots of driving. Your ads will withstand their assault, because you will follow our posting rules from a brand new account, and always use the same ip with the same account. Never say a word or brag, or Craigslist will interrupt your activities. Never flag while logged in to your account.

Remember, our software is the gun. IP’s / proxies / access points are the bullets. Each ip is good for 4 shots at each ad. When you switch ip’s, it’s a new 4 shot clip. Expecting our software to just remove ads from one ip is like buying a hammer, throwing it in the middle of the construction site, and waiting for it to build you a house. You need the access points. We did make that perfectly clear to begin with. Don’t worry about the cookies or reloading, our software does that for you. If you interfere with the cookies while it is operating, you will be firing blanks.

Real Estate

To our realtor friends, near and far.. in every major center, over a billion dollars a year changes hands in your section. Craigslist wants this section to be as trouble free as possible, and they will make special allowances to preserve it’s integrity. You will need to pay someone to wardrive, it’s as simple as that. You want to make $500,000 in commissions next year, or prevent someone else from making that cash, you better have a stream of clean ip’s and keep hitting them hard and fast or the threshold attempts to adjust to your spikes. What I mean is stop for coffee yes, but don’t stop for dinner once you started. The ad will solidify as you dally around. The algorithm will believe there is something genuinely wrong with the ads if a hard steady stream of flags descends upon the target ads. But it will correctly assume you have gone from work to home if you leave a time gap in your flagging, and the threshold will adjust making your flags less potent. They will still count yes, but it requires more. Fast furious flagging from multiple ip’s means there truly is something wrong with the ad and it must come down. Immediate flagging as the ads come up indicates the same. These techniques are applicable in all sections, but especially real estate and services to prevent economic fraud to some degree.

BOTNET

You could convince people in your area to download some kind of botnet agent. It will link them to your computer. You will be able to make full use of their ip address. Read up on BotNet. Yep, it’s totally illegal. But so is economic fraud. It’s illegal for your competition to mass flag your ads, but it’s overlooked. If you had a networking tech create an agent for you, and all you did was flag with it, there would never be any way authorities would deal with this, even if they knew. They are simply too backlogged dealing with predators and real criminals.

Another method we recommend is log me in. It’s a free app, you install our software on your PC, your office computers, your girlfriend’s computers, grandma’s too. Then you install the app on your phone, login to each one by one.. and activate our flagging program from any smart phone or computer by using their computer remotely. Be creative, it’s a pretty slick piece of software, it’s free, and it works on iOS & android for mobile control of other machines.