Craigslist should work splendidly, but my experience has been problematic, whether it's singles ads or computer gigs or computer hardware shopping. The same problems generalize to many sites. Below are ideas to improve the situation. Perhaps I'll start KwynnsList one day. I can program all of this; I just need some encouragement--even good wishes might do. Or I want someone to do this because I want to use it.
Users have the ability to create a rich set of tags, words, and hierarchies; then the system allows you to search for ads with these filters. For example, say you're the first-ever user to read the first-ever singles ad. If you'd like to help other readers, you would have the mechanism to classify the name "Tolkein" in the ad as author of LOTR, then create a fantasy category for him to go under, which goes under sci-fi/fantasy, which goes under fiction which goes under literature / reading / books and / or movies. Once a tag is created, all ads (existing and future) the use the terms in the hierarchy are indexed by the tags. Then users can search singles ads for sci-fi/fantasy or Tolkein or LOTR and come up with that ad. (LOTR would also have a parallel tag of the whole name, of course.)
Craigslist is grouped by cities. This is both very useful and too limiting. I'd like location filtering to be optional. If the love of my life, whom I can now identify by several filters, is 1000s of miles away, I want to be able to find her.
A mechanism for any user to create and manage his own currency, the ability to value items in multiple currencies, etc. Tags for bartering.
Counts of how many responses ads have gotten and how many responses to responses and the time lag between the two.
Between this and other mechanism, there wouldn't be a need for an expiration date of a month or 45 days. Ads could stay up as needed. Problematic ads would be killed by forces other than time (moderation and such).
An ad posts without moderation, but a group of moderators would have the option to review. Users could filter whether an ad has been reviewed, by whom it was reviewed, and what kind of scores / comments it got.
As you click various search filters on and off, you can see how many results you'll get before you hit "go." I did this with my real estate program, but I'm not sure I've ever seen that elsewhere.
My ideas on vocabularies are related to several ideas: the "semantic web" which I heard a lot of discussion of around 2005 and haven't heard much since. Also related is the fields of information architecture. I've seen "knowledge management" come up, too.
This started with my ideas for a dating site. (That was written in very late 2010 and very early 2011.)
There is a system that's been around for decades that rates text in terms of years of education--the US tax code is basically the comprehension of God, many decades, for example. I'm sure there are all sorts of systems to analyze text. I'd like to look into that for singles ads and such eventually.
Please spread the word. Please copy this page or take any ideas you want. If appropriate, I'd like credit and / or a link back to this page, but I'll err on the side of getting this out.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites authors Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, 2006 and editions much earlier. I believe I was reading the first edition before "Designing Large-Scale Web Sites" was added to the title.
I can elaborate on much of this at length. Perhaps I will later.
Page first written on my local machine 2012/01/15.