Frequently Asked Question
Can I get a copy of someone else's Classified Ad that no longer appears online?
Last Updated 5 years ago
I saw an ad in the classifieds a few days/weeks/months ago, but now it is gone. Is there some way that I can retrieve a copy of the ad?
No. While our system does keep an archive of user's expired ads for a finite period of time, we will not provide a copy of them to a third party for reasons of privacy.
But, I need a copy for a court case I am filing.
We still will not voluntarily provide you with a copy of someone else's expired ad for two reasons:
We will respond to the court and explain to them what we just explained to you in #2 above, i.e. we have no idea what the ad said at the time the petitioner read it, nor does our system maintain a time stamped journal of changes to a user's ad that would allow a timeline of changes to be constructed.
THERE MAY BE HOPE: You might try searching the Internet Archive. They take permanent snapshots of webpages and keep them on-file forever.
Go to the Advanced Search page at:
https://archive.org/web/
For the URL, specify http://class.somd.com/ and then specify the appropriate date range to search. (For the previous generation of our classifieds, use http://classifieds.somd.com/ as the site's URL.)
No. While our system does keep an archive of user's expired ads for a finite period of time, we will not provide a copy of them to a third party for reasons of privacy.
But, I need a copy for a court case I am filing.
We still will not voluntarily provide you with a copy of someone else's expired ad for two reasons:
- Providing a copy to a third party violates our user's expectation of privacy, regardless of the reason you say you need it.
- Since a user can edit their ad any number of times while it is online, we have absolutely no idea how the ad read at the time you saw it. The archival copy is the final state of the ad at the time it expired. What it said then may not be what it said when you saw it.
We will respond to the court and explain to them what we just explained to you in #2 above, i.e. we have no idea what the ad said at the time the petitioner read it, nor does our system maintain a time stamped journal of changes to a user's ad that would allow a timeline of changes to be constructed.
THERE MAY BE HOPE: You might try searching the Internet Archive. They take permanent snapshots of webpages and keep them on-file forever.
Go to the Advanced Search page at:
https://archive.org/web/
For the URL, specify http://class.somd.com/ and then specify the appropriate date range to search. (For the previous generation of our classifieds, use http://classifieds.somd.com/ as the site's URL.)