Bulletin Board: How to Build a Website with AI Moderation Yourself

A classifieds site is a user-generated ad platform: you define categories, and AI helps moderate and organize them. Below, we'll explain how to enable this mode, avoid being overwhelmed by junk ads from day one, enable applications from Telegram and WhatsApp and when to start monetizing.

What does a visitor to a classifieds board on your website get?

The visitor sees a feed of ads with a search bar and categories—on a phone, it looks like a swipe feed, a familiar format for any marketplace. You can submit an ad using the "+" button: title, description, price, photo, category, and contact information. Log in via Google, Telegram, or phone number.

The listing page itself features a gallery, descriptions, and communication buttons: Telegram, WhatsApp, phone, Viber, WeChat, or email, depending on what you've enabled in the settings. There are also favorites and a share button—standard for classifieds, flea markets, or service websites. A full list of visitor and owner actions is available in the "Classifieds" mode settings.

How do I enable the "Notice Board" mode and set up moderation from day one?

The mode is enabled with one click: Settings → Site Mode → "Classifieds" card. Data is not lost. The problem isn't the switch, but the moderation: without it, junk ads will appear before the first legitimate ones.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark runs the world's largest classifieds site with virtually no staff moderators, relying on complaints from users themselves:

“With over 30 million people per month visiting our site, the most effective way to deal with bad stuff is to enlist the community in self-policing. So if you find an ad that's wrong, please flag it, and if others agree with you and flag it themselves, then it's removed automatically."

• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, interviewed by Freakonomics

But this only works with a large audience. At the start, with just a few hundred visitors per month, relying solely on complaints is premature, and a full manual review of each listing delays publication and discourages sellers. Osclass's guide to launching a classifieds board explicitly calls moderation a daily responsibility:

“Someone owns the pending queue every day. Cron expires ads. A backup restore was tested once.”

• Osclass, a guide to starting a job board

This means the queue for verification should have a specific person in charge, who opens it every day. A practical option is a hybrid. Set it up in your account:

1. Publishing mode: "New ads - first for review" at the start (while there are few ads and you have time to view each one) or "publish immediately" when the flow grows and the delay becomes more noticeable than the risk.
2. AI moderation based on your criteria: clean ads are published immediately, while suspicious ones are reviewed manually—a combination of "immediate filter + human review." AI moderation and automatic text-based headings are available on AI-powered plans.
3. The "Complaints" section in your dashboard—check it at least once a day. Hacker News user rickreynoldssf described exactly this kind of inaction on a major platform: "Reporting the scammers to Meta is pointless... Weeks later, all the accounts were still active and scamming" ( source). On a smaller board, this would be noticed even faster than on Facebook Marketplace.

How does AI sort ads into categories without your input?

If a visitor doesn't select a category when submitting an ad, the AI automatically determines one based on the ad text—this feature saves time otherwise spent manually sorting hundreds of ads. The AI can also create new categories automatically, or it can be limited to a predefined tree.

Categories are built as a tree: a category has subcategories and attributes such as "choice," "number," or "text," which the subcategories inherit from their parent. For example, in the "Auto Parts" category, attributes might include make and year, and the subcategories inherit both fields automatically—no need to configure them again for each branch.

This combination—automatic headings based on text plus attributes inherited by subheadings—removes some of the manual work in the first weeks, when every unnecessary action by the seller reduces the chance that they'll even get to the "publish" button.

You don't have to build a job board like this yourself or hire a developer: 1001site AI builds a website with this logic in 2-7 minutes after payment. All you have to do is fill in the moderation criteria and create categories that suit your niche.

Why accept ads from Telegram and WhatsApp if you already have a website?

Some of your future sellers won't physically open the form on your website if they can send photos and text directly to their existing chat. Receiving ads from messengers solves exactly this: it's convenient for sellers to write in their usual chat, and the ad still ends up on the website. A similar combination—an AI assistant that also receives messages from Telegram and processes them automatically—is discussed in the case study about an online sauce store.

Setting up via Telegram takes four steps:

1. Create a bot via @BotFather with the /newbot command and copy the token.
2. Add the bot as an administrator to a group or channel with the right to read and post messages, find out the chat_id (@userinfobot will tell you).
3. Enable group/channel reception in Settings → Telegram and WhatsApp, and enter the token and chat_id. Separately, enable reception in the bot's private messages if you want to receive announcements directly from subscribers.
4. Set up an AI acceptance consultant: what's required in an ad (price, city, photo) - the bot will tell the author what's missing and automatically extract the price and title from the text.

WhatsApp connects via a QR code and also accepts ads from groups and private messages. You can create a separate number specifically for posting. The bot automatically posts each new ad, no matter where it comes from, to your Telegram channel or WhatsApp group and sends the author a website link—this is also part of Telegram reception settings.

A long form on a website, where you have to fill out every field immediately, is more intimidating than a regular chat: there, you just send a photo and price in one message, and the AI consultant will clarify the details later.

How to solve the "no ads - no visitors" problem at the start?

It's hard for a classifieds site to attract buyers without ads, and without buyers, sellers won't come either—it's a standard chicken-and-egg problem for any classifieds board.

Real-world platforms often solved this through supply: first, they provided goods or sellers, and only then did demand build. The NFX Fund examined this using Uber as an example:

«Uber initially paid the supply-side - drivers in key cities - to be on their app so that riders always had a car to book».

• James Currier, NFX

For a local classifieds board, this means one thing: manually collect a few dozen high-quality listings before going public. Call your local mechanics, negotiate with a couple of parts sellers, and take photos of a few listings yourself. Sharetribe, in its academy for marketplace founders, recommends the same: meet your first suppliers in person and explain how the platform works to them before inviting random people.

You can also use the "Open as Admin" feature here—you post an ad on your own website without moderation, and the feed appears live from day one. This is the honest way: the ads are real, and no one is making up sellers. NFX also describes the opposite scenario: PayPal and early Reddit initially created fake activity using bots and fake accounts to avoid appearing empty. This tactic has historically been successful in boosting growth, but for local businesses, where a reputation is built over years in a single city, the risk of having their scam exposed is more costly than a slow, honest start.

One niche or everything at once: where to start a classifieds board?

Start with one niche and one region: 10 listings in a narrow category look like a lively marketplace, while the same 10 spread across twenty categories look like a blank website in each of them. Whether it's a city flea market, a car dismantling yard, real estate, or service providers, start with the category where you already have your first sellers, and add other categories as your business grows. The developers of Osclass summarize the same principle succinctly:

«One region, one vertical. Thin inventory everywhere loses to a full category tree with empty hubs.»

• Osclass

A narrow niche typically yields a more engaged audience and higher conversion rates for calls or messages, but the overall traffic at launch will also be lower than with a "everything" board—this is a conscious compromise at the launch stage.

How to make money on a classifieds site without scaring off the first sellers?

Monetizing from day one on an empty site scares off the sellers you're trying to attract. Osclass describes a similar sequence: first, free placement in the starting category, then paid promotion (promoting to the top, highlighting the ad), and only then paid packages or subscriptions for active sellers.

The site with the "Bulletin Board" mode has ready-made blocks for this:

• Paid ad promotion - packages and rates for sellers, payment via Stripe or Monobank.
• Advertising - your own Google AdSense, your own banners or paid banners from advertisers.
• Free ads limit per seller - beyond the limit, it is proposed to purchase a package.

Enable these blocks one by one: first, let the feed fill with free ads, then it will make sense to pay for the ad to be seen first.

How many ads per day can one moderator handle?

The moderation workload is growing faster than the number of sellers: the more people post listings, the more random junk and fraudulent attempts they contain. Besedo, a company that moderates content for marketplaces worldwide, describes its operating model as a combination of AI and human moderation: "Besedo combines AI with human moderation to spot risks across every user touchpoint." Neither pure AI nor pure manual review are equally effective on their own—keep both layers enabled: automatic filtering based on criteria and time for manual review of complaints.

Classifieds or online store: which website mode should you choose?

Both modes live on the same site and can be switched in the settings without losing data – the difference is who fills the catalog: you or visitors.

If you already have your own products and warehouse, an online store is more suitable for you. If your goal is to create a platform where other people post ads (city, community, niche), a classifieds board is suitable for you. You can switch the mode later at any time: your ads will remain, only the main page and features will change.

Sources

• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, interviews Freakonomics about self-moderation and user complaints.
• Osclass - a guide to launching a classifieds site: moderation, niche development, and monetization sequence.
• James Currier, NFX - Analysis of tactics for solving the "chicken and egg" problem using examples from Uber, eBay, and Craigslist.
• A discussion on Hacker News about scams and complaint responses on major classifieds sites.
• Sharetribe Academy – a hands-on experience with the marketplace's first suppliers.
• Besedo - content moderation for marketplaces, combining AI and humans.

A full description of the mode and all its settings is available in the 1001site knowledge base. You can view this pre-built version in the 1001site AI builder – the style catalog is available for viewing at any time.