> "I never mentioned "purity," did I?"

No, but there's a large internal inconsistency that you have (that the rest of flag-help shares). There's on the one hand the assumption that the flag is used for good (a.k.a. flagging things that violate the TOU).

On the other hand there's the acceptance that users will flag whatever the hell they feel like, TOU be damned.

Which forms the standard path that a flag-help post travels through:

- Help!

- You must be violating the TOU.

- But... there's nothing in here violating the TOU!

- Sure you did, nub. I bet you had external pics too.

- But no, I didn't!

- Oh well, then, who knows, shrug people will flag what they will.

Which is why I keep saying flag-help is just about no help at all. It's just a lot of newbie-hazing, but very rarely do I see any real productivity out of it. It's only when the post is obviously TOU-violating or offensive that the flag-help users have anything tangible to add.

If the flag-help forum is anything even close to a representative sample of what users are flagging, I'd say that the main uses of the flag feature have nothing to do with violations of CL TOU, despite the site's repeated warnings in the UI that the flag feature is for TOU violations only.

> "I agree that there's a learning curve in posting ads to gigs"

That's the problem. There isn't. When everything no-pay gets flagged off in short order, there isn't a learning curve. There is a brick wall.

> "but the number of flags required to bring an ad down puts the math on the poster violating community standards."

This is an assumption, and a particularly false one at that. Craigslist has never released any documentation on how many flags it takes to bring down an ad. The only thing we know for sure is that it is higher than one. From my own observations on low-traffic categories, this number is likely < 5. An unsophisticated troll/griefer can easily issue five flags in short order and take something down single-handedly.

The fact that a post got flagged is not at all evidence that the poster has done something the community does not appreciate. In fact, from my own observations in gigs/creative is that my ads consistently get a strong interested response... as long as they stay up. From the looks of it from other posters posting ads similar to mine, there is a single dedicated troll who griefs the entire category. CL does nothing to solve this.

tl;dr: My ads are well-written, conform to all guidelines, and get a consistently strong response (at least 3/hour that the post stays up). Yet, what looks like a single griefer (or a small group of griefers) ruins the category for everyone - not only myself but other people posting similar ads. That a single griefer can take down this sort of functionality is part of why CL is fundamentally broken.

> "Unpaid jobs are basically illegal, taxwise"

Oh here we go. Now I know with good confidence you're one of the flag-help users :) When a perfectly innocuous-looking post is submitted to flag-help that seems to conform to TOU and is otherwise inoffensive, flag-help users will go to great lengths, make tenuous connections, and make assumptions about the poster in order to maintain their false belief that the flag feature is largely used properly by users, despite overwhelming evidence that it is abused.

So when an artist is seeking collaborators, flag-help will falsely associate this with "unpaid job", then link this to tax law, in order to convince themselves that somehow this post must violate TOU. Otherwise, why would the fine, upstanding CL community flag it? Surely there are no trolls and griefers in our midst!

This falls in line with my own experience. Flag-help insisted that, because I'm a photographer looking to collaborate, I should be posting to services/creative (despite the fact that I was looking for collaborators on a specific project, therefore am not offering myself up in general). The insistence was that I was miscategorized, and thus flagged. The notion of a troll was never acknowledged. After bringing this up, flag-help changed their tune, and at the end of the day settled on "well, some users just don't like no-pay gigs, tough".

tl;dr: Craigslist apologists have the incompatible dual beliefs that: flags are for the most part used as they are designed/intended (i.e. enforcing community guidelines)... and people will also flag whatever they want because they don't like it, even if it doesn't violate any community guidelines. This leads to the false belief that the CL flagging system is infallible, at the same time encouraging people to gloss over or construct elaborate stories to maintain the illusion that there doesn't exist an epidemic of false flagging.