You Suck at Craigslist

Category: administrivia

  • YSaC, Vol. 1800: So long, and thanks for all the bees.

    Um.

    So, in the summer of 2008 I was spending a fair amount of time on my local Craigslist. I started noticing that people in my town were pretty bad at Craigslist, and I started posting some of the more egregious ads to my Livejournal account (remember those?) and making fun of them. My friends made the mistake of encouraging me, and You Suck at Craigslist was born.

    I made it through 200 posts using Roman numerals as titles before I figured out THAT was a bad idea. It was somewhere around post #350 that Dan started to help out, and we’ve been co-authoring it since then. Somewhere along the way we picked up the nicknames of the Llamanun and the Ostrimu, and also picked up the most clever bunch of minions – er, commenters – that the internet has ever seen. We held meetups wherever we went, and we got to meet people who … well, they got us, and they were wonderful.

    We almost got to write a book somewhere in there, back when every blog on the internet was being offered a book, but lost out when we refused to dumb it down. We also almost got bought by a large cheeseburger-focused website, but that fell through too, because we would have lost the rights to everything we had done, and there were no guarantees that we could have kept doing it. We just liked doing it.

    It’s been over six years of bees, things that aren’t lions, French non-Provincial furniture, and every spelling imaginable of chihuahua, armoire, and ottoman. We’ve made jokes about things as diverse as the Maginot Line, Chuck Close, and Marcel Duchamp. William Gibson, Roger Ebert, and Dan Piraro all publicly said they liked our website. We’ve written soliloquies, operas, and movies, and more song parodies than anyone other than Weird Al Yankovic. (Some of them even got recorded.)

    And we loved every minute of it.

    That’s why this is really hard for us. As life has a tendency to do, whether you want it to or not, life has changed for us since 2008, and both of us have things going on now that demand our attention. We’re at post #1800 as of today, which is a nice round number … and so as of today, we’re (un)officially calling an end to You Suck at Craigslist.

    We’ve put together a list of the Best of the Worst posts of 2014, and we’d be honored if you took the time to re-read some of our favorite moments. As always, no clickbait – the original posts and our commentary are now all on one page, but we urge you to take the time to click through to each individual post and read the comments, which are usually the best part of the site.

    Thanks to everyone – everyone who read the site, commented, or sent in submissions. The site would not have worked without you. Thanks to Craig Newmark for not suing us. And a special thanks to all of the Sparkys who posted on Craigslist and gave us such a wealth of material to work with. We will miss all of you.*

    -Llamanun and Ostrimu

     

    *This is actually true. Well, maybe not the Sparkys.

  • Multiple WOW weekend.

    This here little website had a pretty good weekend, and I’d like to share that with you for just a moment. (Don’t worry, today’s post is just below this one.)

    On Saturday, I noticed a lot of hits coming from Twitter. Imagine my surprise when I traced the hits back to this Twitter post, which came from none other than the author William Gibson. (If you don’t know who he is, go read Neuromancer and then come back. We’ll wait.)

    Yeah, I about fell over. William Gibson and his wife like You Suck at Craigslist! Whoo-hoo!

    So it got retweeted, and retweeted, and retweeted … and here was the result:

    stats

    That big spike at the end there? That’s Sunday. 15,487 page views. The site’s previous best was on Thursday June 11th (which happens to be my birthday, which made me happy!) with 9,346 page views. So Sunday just blew that away.

    I’m thrilled beyond belief. I’m thrilled that William Gibson and his wife like the site. I’m thrilled that so many other people like the site. I’m thrilled in general, because the reason the site is doing well is because of you.

    Yes, you.

    You read the site. Maybe you submit listings to the site. Maybe you comment on entries. Maybe you tell your friends about the site and get them involved. The reason this site is doing well is because of you, dear readers, and for that I thank you. Please continue to read, submit, comment, and tell, and I will continue to be humbled and amazed. And thrilled.

    And now … our regularly scheduled post occurs directly below this one. Thank you. Have a sammich.

  • Update: Host switch completed, with minimal exploding.

    Update to the update, Monday, 10 pm: It seems to be working, and working well! There may be a few lost comments if you commented on anything this afternoon; there was a brief period of time between finally figuring out how to export the old site and figuring out how to import it to the new location, and if anyone commented during that rather frantic period, it didn’t make it over. I apologize!

    Thanks for your patience during the move! I look forward to not having to wait three minutes to switch between the edit mode and the preview mode while I’m writing posts.

    Update, Mon 4:15 pm: I think we’ve made the switch … DNS will probably take a while to propagate around the intertubes so things might still be slow for a bit. Please let me know if anything weird happens on your end — let me know either in the comments, or via email to yousuckatcraigslist@gmail.com. (Also let me know if it’s working better!) Today’s post is up below this entry if’n you haven’t seen it yet.

    Hi folks. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably just sat there for about ten seconds waiting for the page to load (or more! It takes me ~30 seconds sometimes!).

    That’s unacceptable, so I’m switching hosts this week. (For what it’s worth, FatCow is my old hosting provider, and as of right now I’m planning to move to WebFaction.com. I’m really not happy with the service from FatCow — from searching around online I’ve found that I’m not the only one experiencing these problems with them recently.)

    What that means is that at some point or another, something is bound to go wonky with the site — it will be unavailable or the formatting will explode or something else weird will happen. Murphy’s Law, right?

    If we do go down, please be patient — YSaC will be back, and hopefully be faster than before. I’ll try to update the Facebook page and the Twitter feed when things are back to normal.

    In the meantime, use your spare time (you know, the time you’ve been using to wait for the pages to load!) to search for Craigslist posts to send in! Oh, and have a sammich.

  • I know, I know …

    … the site is still somewhat messed up. I promise I will get to it soon, but in the meantime I appreciate everyone’s patience.

    I may start trying other themes to see if that helps, so if the site suddenly looks different, that’s why. (I promise not to change themes every time you visit.)

    And keep sending in listings! I’m going to get better about responding to everyone just as soon as I can breathe again.

    Thanks, folks — and thanks to everyone who’s written me recently to say they enjoy the site. It’s much appreciated!

  • Website gremlins have no sense of timing …

    Hi folks! Well, there’s something wrong with the site, and I can’t figure out what it is. The most recent post is showing up, but comments are disabled on it — and all prior posts as well, and the formatting has gone totally wonky on those pages too.

    I’m going to look into it, but I might not be able to get to it until tomorrow. In the meantime, if anyone has any idea what has been b0rked, and how to unb0rk it, feel free to let me know!

    Oh, and send me Craigslist posts. My queue is REALLY low.

    Edited to add: Okay, that’s weird — for some reason it looks as though commenting has been turned off on all posts. I’ve fixed it on the most recent posts (I think) but the global settings don’t seem to be taking, and I really don’t want to have to toggle that setting on every post!

  • I’ve acheived adequacy!

    Some good news in my inbox this morning: I got an email from the folks over at Blog Review Online, letting me know that YSaC was the most recent victim subject of their lens of scrutiny. I seemed to have passed, with two out of two stars. W00t!

    My favorite part of the review is this:

    This blogger provides adequate and occasionally amusing commentary to the posts.

    Hooray! I’m adequate and occasionally amusing! My work here is done. My mother will be so proud.

    In all seriousness, I’m thrilled that this silly little hobby of mine is getting some attention, and even more thrilled that people are enjoying it. There’s been a steady increase in traffic and in submissions, which can only make the site better and better. (More submissions = more variety of things to post = better!) So, here’s a shameless request: I’d love for people to help publicize the site. Feel free to post it to social networking sites, StumbleUpon, or whatever. Tell people about it — especially if you know they frequent Craigslist and might end up submitting stuff!

    So anyway, thanks. Now get out there and evangelize the adequacy of You Suck at Craigslist!