HN Explorer

Ask HN:How to automatically fill in craigslist post form from another website?

2 points by michjeanty ↗ HN
What is the best way to automatically fill in and submit a craigslist post form from another website? We're making a website that has posts similar to craigslist, and we want to add an option to repost the same post to craigslist with as few steps as possible for the user." Thanks for the help.

3 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread
blasdel
The least assholish method would be to src the Craigslist posting page in an <iframe>, and pre-fill the form via javascript from the containing page.
Travis
Agreed. Also probably the only way you won't get shut down by CL. I've heard that they monitor their usage pretty closely, so if you were to do something like cross-post from your forms or use CURL on your server to retrieve the forms/CAPTCHA they would find it pretty quickly.

The most recent issue was CL blocking Yahoo Pipes access. They unblocked those IPs, but for a while had banned YP due to resource concerns.

So yea, you probably should make sure that the user's browser is the one to make the request to the CL servers. Use JS to help prefill those values.

michjeanty
The only problem is that many browsers (or is it the server I'm requesting from?) don't allow javascript to access something on a different server. So this type of thing doesn't work: window.frames['craigslist_iframe_id'].document.getElementById('something_on_craigslist').innertHTML

The firefox javascript console says "Permission denied" for accessing window.frames['craigslist_iframe_id'].document

Is there something I'm misunderstanding that could help me overcome this hurdle? Is the only solution to have the user copy and paste what they already wrote?