help > flags and community moderation

cragislist receives (as of mid 2005) over five million free classified postings each month, such that our small staff would be hard pressed to manually review even 1% of them.

Fortunately, the flagging system enables the community itself to successfully moderate craigslist.

By using the flagging feature located on the right side of each post, you can take action if you feel a post is miscategorized or for any reason does not belong.

If a post receives too many flags it will automatically be removed, with an explanatory note sent to the poster (only one flag per person per post is counted).

This system is a work-in-progress, and suffers some of the deficiencies of a democracy - for instance, up to 2% of postings removed due to flagging actually fall within the craigslist Terms of Use and posting guidelines - but without it the site would quickly become unusable.

If you have ideas for improving it, please let us know in the feedback forum.

Please note however - of the many hundreds of complaints we've gotten about unfair flagging, nearly 100% of the postings in question fell outside our terms of use.

Posts that are clearly within our Terms of Use may be reposted, reworded if necessary to deflect attention.

It's worth noting that posted diatribes against people flagging your post tend to get flagged off quickly.