We’ve rolled out the long-requested ability to add links to the listing’s description. This way users can provide more information about the items they’re selling or services they provide. It should also help small businesses to get in touch with visitors by linking to their business’es website, facebook or instagram accounts. 

This feature is still in the works and has certain limitations to prevent spam and abuse. Let us know what you think about it at feedback@claz.org

In June we’ve updated our Security Policy and changed the way we notify our users about policy violations.

Many online services, especially Classified Ads, rely on ghosting to keep their users safe. It’s a technique where suspicious or banned content is hidden from other visitors. The owner of the ghosted content is unaware of the ban and has no way of getting back in good standing.

Here at Claz our mission is to maintain a healthy and safe user community. We believe that to succeed, we have to keep a good faith relationship with our users and visitors. We felt it was important to improve the way Claz handles suspected and rejected listings:

• We’ve updated our system to better indicate to the users when the listing is rejected. Users can check the status of the listing (posted, pending, rejected) on My Listings page, Listing Details page, as well as get email notification with listing’s status changes

 

• We’re now doing a better job communicating content-related issues to the users. Claz will send notification if security system was declined listing to post

 

• We’ve added a way for the users to appeal rejections and resolve content-related issues.It has now become possible to ask the administrators to review the ad if it has been blocked by security system by clicking on the Appeal button, if the user feels that he did not violate the TOS.

We hope that these changes will make us more open with our users regarding policy violations and will help to build a better user community on the principles of openness, good faith and trust.

April and May have been busy months for us. We’ve just finished rolling out our latest updates and we hope you’ll like them.

New look. We’ve changed the main theme to be concise and uniform across all pages. We rolled it out as an experiment for a small fraction of users in mid-March, analyzed site usage data and rolled out a global update for all users later in April. The new theme uses colors consistently across pages and makes it easier for users to access most used features of the site – search, “my listings” and user account pages.

Scrollable tabs. We’ve made category tabs scrollable to allow us adding new categories and subcategories of listings in the future.

Better Analytics. Users can now see detailed daily, monthly and historical stats for their ads – to help understand which of their listings work and attract more attention.

User-friendly listing status messages. We’ve added detailed explanation of the listing’s current status – whether it’s visible to other users and what is the status of the community review.

Please let us know what you think about these changes. We will continue to work and find new ways to make our service better for you.

We’ve rolled out a new version of our Top Classified Sites page, which is automatically generated using stats and popularity ratings for free classified ads sites our service knows about.  

Did we miss anything ? Let us know if you have a site you want added to this list.

We’ve spent most of February working on small incremental changes to make our service better and improve user experience.

Email Delivery: we’re now paying much more attention to the way our system forwards email responses and alerts to our users – to decrease the likelyhood of user messages being marked as SPAM. We’ve also revamped our Monthly Analytics Report to make it more informative and expressive and useful.

User Interface: We ran a series of A/B experiments to find out which elements of user interface are more usable and did a number of small tweaks. For example, we placed the Post Ad button at the top of the screen for mobile users to make creating new listings easier.

Also we’ve started showing extra links on the listing details page to help users find similar listings.

Social Networks: We’ve temporarily suspended featuring user listings on Facebook – to work out a way to reduce the chance of accidentally featuring SPAM/SCAM ads.

Bugs: We’ve fixed a problem with some users being unable to sign in because of special characters in their email address.

 

Can’t find what you’re looking for ? Don’t despair, post a Wanted Ad ! We’ve just made it a bit it easier.

Earlier this week  we’ve improved the look of the listing details page. Users can now see more similar listings in the area by scrolling to the bottom of the page. How do you feel about this new feature? We’d be glad to hear from you.

We’ve added listing status alerts . Users now can now be notified when their listing is published, featured, flagged or is about to expire:

These and all other alerts can be turned off on the “My Account” page.

Do you have any other suggestions how we can improve our service ? Let us know !

Over the past two month we’ve been carefully rolling out and testing claz.org in select Canadian locations. We’re happy to announce that the rollout is complete and canadian users can now enjoy our free service. Let us know if you notice any issues !