I am in downtown sydney for a few months and and like to share my experience with fellow traveller. Internet access is easy to find in the city, but getting online is one thing, putting an ad on gumtree.com.au is a very different experience. I have been spending hours and hours try to selling my personal stuff through this site. The problem isnt getting people to buy them.

After writing up my ad, i click the submit button, hoping it's online and good enough to get some shoppers' attention. I got a message on the screen. It said i have to activate it. So i open my email and click the link sent to my from gumtree.com.au.

Surprse, surprise, another message popped up on the screen. It said my ad was already and activated one so the activation thing i just did was totally unnecessary. I felt like a fool but still i was happy to know that my ad was actived (whoever actived for me remained a mystry), so I can just sit back and wait for calls and email from shoppers.

A day went past but no one calls. I went back to the site to find my own ad. There is nowhere in the world i could find it. I felt like a fool again. I was totally mislead. The ad was never up there. My submitted ad was still out there somewhere for gumtree's internal use.

Being extremely frustrated by the experience, i complaint to the site by creating a "ticket" (the site's self-made complaint system, not an independent review)

https://help.gumtree.com.au/index.php?a=add

I check back a day later, the compaint ticket was deleted, the letter I wrote to them was replace by this message "Error: You have been locked out the system for 60 minutes because of too many login failures"

This message was completely false and very misleading, i was never at any time doing any "login" on the site gumtree.com.au, In fact, there is no need for any "login" involved in writing a complaint "ticket"

I decided to create another complaint "ticket", this time someone replied and said that my ad was never online (gosh, i wish i was told before), the staff said they usually notified seller when their ads were deleted by a gumtree staff, but found nothing wrong with my ad, that's why I wasn't told anything. He then revealed their "ip screening" system is responsible for the mistake, meaning hundreds and thunsands of unaware sellers were treated as spammers

Before I used this site, I thought it's a market place for fair play, but it turned out to be something totally different: it's heavily manipulated and it purposly mislead unaware users with a series of fales messages. It's obviously that these messages are design to blame victim users for the site's manipulation and wasted victim users hours and hours of their valuable time.

I wanted to comment on this reply and ask them to further verify some facts. When I visited the complaint "ticket" again, the entire "ticket" including my original letter and the staff's reply dissapeared completely.

The site (gumtree.com.au) went out its way to remind users again and again that sellers take full reponsibily for their ads. This user self-responsible policy doesn't go togther with the heavy handed manipulation, misleading messages and lack of transparency that I experienced with the site.