So I had an idea for a fun t-shirt and needed a quick illustration. I've got some offshore artists I used to generate the artwork for FunDraw.com at low per-piece rates, but since the economy's so down I decided I should post the gig to Craigslist, even if it might cost me 3-4 times more than offshoring, and keep the money in the community.

No good deed goes unpunished.

The first time the ad got "ghosted," which means it was published but wasn't listed (so no one could find it unless I sent them the URL). Why? Apparently because I offered Paypal as one of the ways I was willing to pay the person and offering to use PayPal is a no-no on Craigslist. So I simplified the ad and reposted. This time it made it to the index, but within hours I get this e-mail...

Your posting has been flagged for removal.

Approximately 98% of postings removed are in violation of craigslist posting guidelines.

Please make sure you are abiding by all posted site rules, including our terms of use:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use.html

If you need help figuring out why your posting was flagged, try asking in our flag help forum: http://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=3. Include posting title, body, category, city, how often posted, any images, HTML markup, etc.

If your posting was wrongly flagged down (2% of flagged ads are) please accept our apologies and feel free to repost.

Sorry for the hassle, and thanks for your understanding.

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Date: 2008-02-29 10:21:17
PostID: 591161755
Title: (creative gigs) Illustration In Comic Book Hero Style
Need a single drawing of a specific celebrity done in a heroic comic book style (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc), line-art and simply colored (no fancy shading or gradients) versions. Will provide some photos for reference.

Will just be the celebrity in a simple pose, no background or other characters.

Important part is that this needs to be a vector illustration, not a bitmap. Please be clear on the difference. I'll want it delivered in EPS or SVG format.

This is a work for hire and you'll assign me the copyright. Pay is $30.

Please provide a link to an online portfolio if you have one.

Is that spam? Is that illegitimate?

This is not the first time I've had a legit piecework offer get flagged either. And the one time I can recall one staying live, the responses were few and not great quality.

So this job will be going out of the country because Craigslist and its mob rulers want to make it an agonizing experience to try to offer legitimate piece work to Americans. I'm just done with Craigslist.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Job Hunting, Success, Techno Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.