Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone has a good, happy, healthy Thanksgiving holiday.

My own personal thanks goes out for my wife and children, good, gainful employment, and a loving God.
Best wishes to everyone,
Chris

Several changes have been made to how reports on ads are handled. In one direction, in order for an ad to be removed, the website not only needs to see that multiple people are reporting it, but that they agree on WHY it should be reported. In general this will make it more difficult for ads to be removed.

On the other hand, if an account DOES have ads removed, and if it is having the ads removed for a consistent reason, then even ads that have not been flagged will be pulled from the site. Thus while it is harder for anyone ad to be removed, it is now possible that removal of several ads will cause the removal of a number of related ads.

The report ad button is in the lower right of the ads. Paid ads are exempt from reporting.

In order to make things as simple as possible, I’ve removed the ‘spammer’ option from the report ad button. This makes it less likely that I’ll get a mix of “not relevant to category” and “ad is spam on 4+ categories” reports, and thus more likely that the ad will actually be pulled. Since a spam ads are going to get pulled from the site after a couple of them are pulled, I think this ends up working out in the end.

I’ve also combined the “rude / offensive” report label with “inappropriate / not family friendly” option. The same concept is at play there, since they were similar concepts, I didn’t want to avoid pulling an offensive ad because the reports against it were split between two different labels.

As side note, there is also an option for reporting an ad as “marked as sold”. Reporting the ad in this way DOES NOT HARM the poster of the ad. It provides feedback that the ad is completed and can be removed, but does not count against the person posting the ad in any way.

Thanks,
Chris

Again I extend my apologies to those of you inconvenienced by the classifieds rejecting paid ads earlier this morning. The problem seems corrected now.

What had happened is yesterday we had a scammer manage to post a bulldog ad as a paid ad, using a stolen credit card no doubt. I had gone into the subroutine to fix the bug that allowed them to get their ad through. In the process I managed to introduce another bug that started rejecting legitimate ads.
Thanks,
Chris

Many paid ads are being rejected right now. I believe it is because of a bug I introduced into our code base yesterday. I expect to have the problem fixed before lunch time today, and will post an update here when I have done so. My apologies to those of you inconvenienced by this problem.
Thanks,
Chris

Today we made an upgrade to the image upload portion of the website. Most people won’t notice, however certain types of jpegs and bitmaps will now upload correctly.

In completely unrelated news, Kid Rock’s new CD, “Born Free” was released today. I haven’t heard a single track from it, so I don’t have a review of it. I just know that it exists.
Thanks,
Chris

Tomorrow, Nov 2, is election day.

In the last few days weeks there have been a lot of google AdSense ads purchased for political purposes. Because google ads make up a good portion of what keeps this site alive day by day, we have been running those google ads. It was brought to my attention that a fair number of them being run on the Pennswoods.net Classifieds were anti-Toomey. The closer I looked, the more it appears to me that they are at least in part targeting key words like ‘gun’, ‘rifle’, etc. It doesn’t surprise me, given that Sestak has the full backing of the Brady Campaign, and is rated F by the NRA (information from the wikipedia page for Sestak), that Sestak isn’t running pro-Sestak ads on those keywords. It would be wasted advertising dollars. Instead his campaign targets those key words with a negative campaign. Incidentally Toomey has an A rating from both the NRA and the GOA.

I offered to run some free pro-Toomey banner ads on behalf of the individual who brought this to my attention, but he declined to take me up on the offer.


My apologies to anyone who has been offended by the google advertising. It is a free market, google sells its advertising to the highest bidder. Of course google also tends to donate large sums to the democrats. That page is five years old, but go to google (or your favorite search engine) and search for “google political contributions” for more current bits.

For those looking for motivation to go out and vote, check out this article on Pajamas Media by Victor Davis Hanson, or stop by Gun Voters.


Regardless of your political leanings, please plan on voting tomorrow. The most certain way for all of us to lose is to allow a tiny percentage of voters to make the decision for all of America.

Thanks,
Chris