Does Craigslist personals actually work?

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I read somewhere CL personal replies were about 84% spam. I use it too in addition to dating sites, but my replies are more like 99.8% spam.... Maybe 1 out of 500 replies is real. I've tried looking in the women seeking men section too but very few women post in there --- about one ad far every ten male ads. They did improve it using an anonymous reply system so you can exchange messages without a scammer getting your real email address. Now 99% of the replies are from bots sending messages asking you to text out of state phone numbers. ( or use free email addresses )

Well I tried and got two real responses (live in a town of 100,000), but I only kept it up for a week.

1. Wanted to hook up for teh sekz and I was too scared to keep talking to her. She freaked me out and I'm not into casual sex.

2. Second wound up being a college student in a neighboring town ('bout a 20 minute drive away), we talked on the phone and e-mail for a couple of weeks then hung out in person a couple of times, hooked up a couple of times, then I got busy (I think I got deeper into my alcoholism and sort of cut the world out) so I just stopped talking to her.

yes i have met a few people off there in the past. they were mean to me.

I guess it works if you enjoy being scammed or hooking up with a guy who was posing as a girl.

CL can work you just gotta use different sense. Require them to put something in the subject line. Don't reply to ads asking you for a photo first. If they display a number in their first email, don't text them. When you meet, meet at a public place and tell others where you're going. Yes there are scams on CL but they are avoidable. My first relationship was a woman from CL. It's a harsh environment though. And if you are on there you might want to lower some of your standards. It is CL after all.

If you have to use Craigslist for anything, I'd definitely meet in a very crowded public place. One of the biggest scams around here is meeting someone off of Craigslist, and that person then calls in a group of accomplices to rob the person. Another guy was selling his truck. When the guys showed up, they killed him and took his truck to a party.

This is more of an issue when it comes to selling items because thieves know you're bringing valuable items with you to meet them, but you should still be very careful.

Occasionally the platonic section has a few good people, but every other section is BS. I met someone who wanted a relationship on there, but I decided I didn't like her enough. Another girl was already in a relationship and wanted to be friends, but I moved to Virginia before I could meet her. Generally, there's nothing Craigslist can do that Ok Cupid can't do, besides, of course, getting right down to messaging. Because Craigslist is anonymous, it can be easier to talk to people, but just in the sense of making things up as you go without having fake "standards" to get in the way. Standards on a dating site is proportional to that person's ego. If someone is too good to have a regular conversation, that person is not ready for a friendship or a relationship.

Craigslist scares me

My friend met her husband on it so it can work but yeah, you have to do a lot to protect yourself.

I met my girlfriend who I hope I will spend my life with on CL, as well as my former long-term relationship. One of my best friends met her husband there. Maybe we're the exceptions, but it does happen. Plus I have a lesbian friend who met her long-term girlfriend there - that doesn't disprove the "only if you're gay" claim, I guess, but it does show that you can find real relationships there. I will tell you what my now-married friend told me: if you're going to use CL to try to find someone, be very specific about who you are and what you want, be patient and willing to sift through a lot of debris (spammers, scammers, people who send one-sentence misspelled invitations to hook up and/or pictures of their body parts, etc.) in order to find the maybe one quality person in the mix. All you need is one, after all.

I started using CL more lately since most of the women I try to contact on regular dating sites are never online, don't reply, or have too narrow an age preference set. I got bold and tried posting ads for an aspie or a woman on physical or mental disability. Or putting catchy titles like "seeking child free woman" It can work - - I get a few legitimate replies every week or two. Made a few facebook friends off of there and even got one date. It's easy to spot the fakes and I started flagging all the spam/scam replies. That seems to be working. I didn't get hardly any the past few days. The advantage of CL is that it is all current and posting an ad makes the woman contact you first. Also no worries about age ranges and other restrictions a lot of people set on dating sites. Any one can reply. I almost hit it off with a woman a few months ago, but she turned out to be too far away. (Like two CL cities away)