Shaun F.

Although I've primarily been using Kijiji for apartment hunting, I decided to try posting a personal ad looking for an activity partner (I used to do this occasionally on Craigslist before its personals shut down). I read the rules, which stated that it was against their policy to advertise anything outside of platonic friendship (i. E. dating or anything of a sexual nature). Ok, fine, no problem there. So I posted an ad stating a few basic physical characteristics, my interests and intentions, and attached a couple completely acceptable pictures of myself. Within ten hours, I check the site and I get the following message: "Oops... your ad must be really popular. It's already gone!"

First of all, what the devil does that even mean... why would my ad be gone if it was popular? I checked my email and it turns out Kijiji sent me a message saying that my ad was removed for violating policy, and explained that it could be misconstrued as a dating request, even though everything I wrote was completely neutral! They also mentioned that all ads had to be "gender neutral" and that you couldn't request friendship from the opposite sex. I was furious, especially considering that there were (and still are as of this writing) a multitude of ads on the site that clearly fit that criteria to the letter- men requesting friendships from females and including the exact same kind of info and wording as what I wrote.

So I wrote a detailed complaint to them, asking them why they singled out my ad over all the others that had still not been removed after being active for weeks. I was very polite and courteous with them. After sending the message, the automatic response said that a representative would contact me "shortly". I have no idea what "shortly" means in Kijiji's world but after 12 hours and still no reply, I wrote them a forceful message saying that I was going to repost my ad, and subsequent removals were going to result in me filing a discrimination complaint against them with consumer affairs. Well, can you guess what happened? Same thing, only it took about 3 hours this time. Still no other removals of any other ads.

This behaviour is absolutely disgusting and Kijiji are a bunch of cowardly sociopaths for doing this. Pathetic.