Craigslist is limiting use of HTML

Craigs list is going to limit the use of HTML tags in body of ads. Craigslist has taken this initiative because "much of the HTML in postings these days is used by spammers for harmful purposes, such as cloaking spam links, embedding false keywords, and overriding the flagging system.", as mentioned on craigslist site.

Details of proposed permitted HTML tags have been for review by the users on the craigslist site and is available here http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/html_in_craigslist_postings
The proposed allowed tags are :

• basic text formatting tags like <B> <U> etc.
• Line breaks : <BR> <p>
• Horizontal line <hr>
• Headers : <H1> <H2> ... <H6>
• Unordered and ordered lists: <UL> <OL> <LI>
• Dictionary lists: <DL> <DT> <DD>
• Hyperlink: <A>
• Image : <IMG>
• Preformatted text: <PRE>
• Table: <table> <TR> <TD>

It may be noted that use of <DIV> & <SPAN> will not be permitted.

Discussion on this proposal is going on craigslist's help forum. Checkout this. It seems most of the users are supporting the move. So it may be anticipated that craigslist will limit use of HTML as soon as it can finish necessary software updates.

CAPTCHA twist another trick of Craigslist

Did you post any ad very recently on Craigslist? Have you noticed that sometimes craigslist says wrong input for CAPTCHA image although you are entering accurately? Have you noticed that often second time verification image is given after you click on the ACCEPT button?

Are all these due to problems on craigslist servers?

Perhaps not. These seem to be the latest tricks from Craiglist to stop the auto-posters. Not a bad idea at all. Such random placement of verification image will make most of the auto-posting tools null and void. Who doesn't know that mostly hardcore spammers and scammers use those craigslist auto posting tools.

Synopsis of craigslist

Craigslist is the leader of free classifieds sites. It is founded by Craig Newmark in 1995. He started craigslist to serve as a non-commercial community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums.
Although the site has gained huge popularity and now one of the top traffic catching site, it has retain it's non corporate nature. It has a large network worldwide in about 450 cities in all 50 US states and over 50 countries.

Due to its incredible popularity the site has become target of the spammers. Craig and his team have shown their excellent capability fighting against those spammers. Specially, the auto-posting tools has created huge overload on the site. Craig seems very much successful to fight against auto-posting tools.

Craigslist gets more than 5 billion page views per month. Over 14 million new classified ads are posted on craigslist each month.

The strength of the site is that it allows a wide range of HTML elements in posting including link to any website, external image, formatting html elements with style="..." , table, div, span and so on. While other free classifieds sites allow only basic text formatting like <b>, <u>, <i> etc. However, Craigslist prohibits using javascript, video, flash and some attribute inside <style> tag.