about | help | captcha – craigslist
craigslist uses the reCAPTCHA service from Google to help verify that a real person is posting an ad.
When asked to “type the words below, ” you should see images/phrases that have been retrieved from Google’s servers.
If no words appear, here are several things to consider:
you didn’t give the page long enough to load — try reloading as it can take up to 10 seconds at times to load the images from Google’s servers
you are using a browser extension like NoScript, which disables some scripts from running — either turn off javascript entirely or tell the browser extension that it’s OK to run scripts from
you are using a browser extension like RequestPolicy, which prevents page elements from being loaded from other sites — tell RequestPolicy it’s all right to load items from when viewing that page
make sure you can access this link directly () — if you are unable to do so, your computer cannot access data from for some other reason (possibly a network block from your network provider or block by third-party software like Norton Internet Security)
Click here for more info (and further troubleshooting tips) from Google on their reCAPTCHA service.
Cragslist CAPTCHA Bypass | Octoparse
Table of Contents
About Craigslist
Why Craigslist Blocks
How to solve Craigslist Captcha
You must have heard of Craigslist which is known as a well-rounded classified advertisements website with sections of various post categories. Sometimes, we may want to scrape data for various reasons of research analysis, commercial prediction, personal uses and some other intentions. However, scraping or crawling data from Craigslist is truly a bit challenging when considering how they set up everything for its website. Craigslist hasn’t provided any public APIs for users to scrape data and have data formatted compared with most other websites and database, like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and etc.
As we mentioned before, Crigslist should be categorized as a special site for its different structural architecture. They do have an API, while it only allows you to post but not to pull out read-only data, which is essentially different from other sites. This scheme and implementation may embrass some people, however, it does benefit Craigslist by denying amout of crawlers and scrapers’access to their dataset from the view of Craigslist themselves. It implies that you may only visit Craigslist via a web browser or email client, post to Craigslist or their bulk posting API, nevertheless, any intention to scrape or crawl their dataset concerned with personal or contact information will be banned.
Here, the concept of scraping legality should be mentioned, since Craigslist even has taken legal measures to deal with those with detrimental scraping or crawling based on the data scraping scale, how and where the data is used. Besides, it uses the CAPTCHA service from Google to help verify that a real person is posting an ad. Therefore, it implies that it would be hard for people to collect data and bypass CAPTCHA intellectually.
Proxies for browsing Craigslist
Since we know Craigslist is aggressive about scrapers with its particular CAPTCHA and API scheme, proxies should be considered as an option. Why? It is their only way to identify a scraper that is to sense the same IP address keeping sending requests to the webpage per second too frequently. Actually, it is not able to tell what users are doing, it just browses, like the crawler or spider. Talking about the proxies, they lessen the traffic by utilizing a list of rotating web servers, tunneling the origin from the website. Then, we may select certain scraper tools to process the IP rotation.
Tools that can bypass Craigslist captcha
Actually, there are some easy-to-use automatic scraper tools we can choose so that we can deal with these configurations in a much effective and easy way, like Octoparse,, Unipath and etc. These tool all provide more succinct methods for us to configure the rotating proxies, even they have provided a more reliable Cloud-based Service. Anyway, even though we could deal with the dilemma caused by Craigslist particular API scheme, there still exists a problem given by Craigslist CAPTCHA. Till now, few scraper tools could wrestle with such complex task concerned with CAPTCHA. Thus, a more practical and prevalent approach taken now is to utilize CAPTCHA Human Bypass, which implies it requires some labor work. Anyway, bypassing the CAPTCHA may not be that far away, as people have achieved this “bypass” action by looping through the images from CAPTCHA until OCR readable ones are retrieved. Then, the final result is that thousands of CAPTCHA images are retrieved. All in all, for the CAPTCHA Bypass while scraping, we still have a long way to go.
Author: The Octoparse Team
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about | help | captcha – craigslist
craigslist uses the reCAPTCHA service from Google to help verify that a real person is posting an ad.
When asked to “type the words below, ” you should see images/phrases that have been retrieved from Google’s servers.
If no words appear, here are several things to consider:
you didn’t give the page long enough to load — try reloading as it can take up to 10 seconds at times to load the images from Google’s servers
you are using a browser extension like NoScript, which disables some scripts from running — either turn off javascript entirely or tell the browser extension that it’s OK to run scripts from
you are using a browser extension like RequestPolicy, which prevents page elements from being loaded from other sites — tell RequestPolicy it’s all right to load items from when viewing that page
make sure you can access this link directly () — if you are unable to do so, your computer cannot access data from for some other reason (possibly a network block from your network provider or block by third-party software like Norton Internet Security)
Click here for more info (and further troubleshooting tips) from Google on their reCAPTCHA service.
Frequently Asked Questions about craigslist recaptcha
craigslist uses the reCAPTCHA service from Google to help verify that a real person is posting an ad. When asked to “type the words below,” you should see images/phrases that have been retrieved from Google’s servers.
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