Talk:Personal advertisement/Archive 1

Transgender respect
>> GG: Genetic Girl/Real Girl/All-Girl as opposed to a TV/TS/TG "girl"

I don't think this is very respectful to the transgender people:


 * Use of the term "Real Girl" which implies that transgender people are not legitimate of their gender
 * Use of "girl" in quotes which indirectly implies that they are fakes

Could we get this fixed up to be a bit more respectful? I'm not an etiquette nazi but Wikipedia is. Randilyn (talk) 04:57, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

I agree with part of that - it perhaps should be written as just girl not "girl". the quotation marks are possibly unnecessary and sarcastic.

However, if people are using the term 'Real Girl', it is our job to document it not censor it. The quotation marks around girl seems to be coming from the writers own POV, but the rest of that sentence seems ok.

Maybe someone could link to evidence of "Real Girl" being used, especially in relation to the acronym GG - GG clearly refers to Genetic Girl, but wouldnt it be RG for real girl? If RG is being used separately should it have its own line? or maybe the sentence should be along the lines of

GG/RG/AG: Genetic Girl/Real Girl/All-Girl as opposed to a TV/TS/TG girl

(just speculation, im not an expert on this).

Brunk500 (talk) 08:14, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Policy on External links to personal ads sites
We need to agree on which sites, if any, to list in the external links section. There are thousands of sites doing personal ads, and we can't list them all. We had the same debate over at online poker some time back.

My suggestion is to remove all the links, and have internal wikilinks to articles on specific sites instead. Like Adult FriendFinder and other sites notable enough to have their own wikipedia article. This is an easy and simple rule to enforce and we avoid having to argue with each and every site owner trying to push in a link to their site in this article. Let them instead prove their interest in wikipedia as well as their sites notability by having them actually write a wikipedia-article about it that survives on VFD.

I'll be removing all the external links now, but if the general consensus here is to keep some or all of them, then fine, put them back. But we need to agree on a policy here. Shanes 19:48, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Acutally, I think we already had an informal consensus of what links were to be kept. Each newly added link, has been checked for content and notability, and from what I have noticed, mainly only the mass link spam entries have been removed.  <> Who ? &iquest; ?  20:11, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Why do we need a policy? It's true that this article is frequently a target of spam, but all the current links are OK. Spam gets removed quickly. Rhobite 20:15, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, but what makes a site Ok and worthy of listing? i.e: What's the difference between spam and a legit listing? I just think it would be nice to have something to tell those having their link deleted why we delete it but are keeping all those other links. Shanes 20:30, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * It's the same criteria as with an article, the site is visited, and if it's some small little site with no history, then chances are good it will be removed. If there is one user posting the same link on several articles, its link spam. Not to mention, we put in the edit summary why the link was removed.   <> Who ? &iquest; ?  21:16, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Ok. Sounds a little vague and prune to borderline cases to me (in the case with articles we do have the VFD process). But I really dislike people trying to invent problems where there are none, and as I'm starting to feel like that's excactly what I'm doing here, I'll just back off now. Sorry. And, of course, feel free to revert my link-removals. Shanes 21:43, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

related websites
I converted the external links to italicized text, for example purposes, and to aleviate link spam. <> Who ? &iquest; ? 02:18, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Useful resources
A JSTOR search brings up a number of hits on "personal ad(s)". Some titles in case someone is interested in writing a proper article eventually:

Journal of Marriage and the Family 1989
 * Catherine Cameron; Stuart Oskamp; William Sparks, "Courtship American Style: Newspaper Ads", The Family Coordinator 1977
 * "Racial Steering in the Romantic Marketplace", Harvard Law Review 1994 (I can't see an author's name on this one)
 * Bonnie Auslander "In Search of Mr. Write", College English 1993
 * Theresa Montini; Beverly Ovrebro, "Personal Relationship Ads: An Informational Balancing Act", in Sociological Perspectives 1990
 * Stanley B. Woll; Peter Young, "Looking for Mr. or Ms. Right: Self-Presentation in Videodating",

It's an interesting topic, and there is undoubtedly much more. I just grabbed a few. Uppland 18:44, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

abbreviations
What does "ski" mean? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 137.139.230.56 (talk • contribs).
 * What context was it in? Could it mean the ski in skiing? — EncMstr 19:17, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * No, it is constantly used on Craig's List, and it does not mean skiing. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 137.139.161.58 (talk • contribs).
 * I searched Seattle, Portland and S.F. area craigslist ads for ski: it always meant the literal sport.  However, in the New York listings, it appears to be used about half the time associated with cocaine, as snow is slang for cocaine.  For example, a snow bunny could mean a female cocaine user.  A more blatant ad says got some excellent snow, good wine, and hopefully good company to ski with.  The article needs updating as this isn't an abbreviation, but code or slang. — EncMstr 17:56, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

The abbreviation "DL" for "Down low" and the code word "420" for marijuana were both removed from this article. Since both of these are used frequently in personal ads, it is not clear to me why these changes were said to to be "not constructive." That does not appear to be an adequate explanation for the reversion. Anyone interested in reading personal ads who is not familiar with them might appreciate the listing of the terms on this page and the links to the full articles. Robert.Allen (talk) 08:20, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm just not having a very good evening is all. I've restored the previous version of the page.  When viewing the diff's at the time, the additions appeared to have constituted unconstructive edits, however, looking back on it they do appear to be constructive after all.  I'm more than glad to admit when I'm in the wrong. :-). DJBullfish (talk) 08:46, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

TLA three letter acronym
First, many of these are not three letters. Second, TLA does not mean three letter acronym. It means three letter abbreviation. TLA is NOT an acronym. An acronym is an abbreviation that can be pronounced as a word. But since it is pretty often used as such, so I am not sure whether to change it or not.

SimonTrew (talk) 12:40, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

ACA
I see the abbreviation ACA quite a lot in lonely hearts ads. I'm guessing it means "a casual acquaintance" or "a casual arrangement". Anyone know so I can add it to the list? 86.157.247.134 (talk) 19:04, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Merge
Missed connections are different and should have their own page. A Personal advertisement is "pre-meditated", whereas a missed connection is totally different, nobody would know a true missed connection unless they had experienced one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.45.218.235 (talk) 12:54, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Missed connection could be merged into this article. Crashandspin (talk) 00:47, 24 November 2009 (UTC)