FAQ - Cambridge Accommodation Notice Board

Beware of criminals who may attempt to use this notice board (as they use other media) to perpetrate scams. Some scams involve seemingly genuine looking advertisements, but if you reply you get an email asking potential tenants to send money before even viewing the property.

I suggest that you do not part with any money until you have visited the property and you have a proper signed contract in your hands. This won't guarantee against fraud, but it will avoid some of the scammers.

If this happens to you please tell the police, and let me have the details of the advertisements so that I can delete them.

Another scam currently doing the rounds is to email you asking you to call back on a premium rate (eg 070) number - you get to pay to listen to a recorded message containing lots of waffle, and there's no real room or tenant on offer of course.

This page is a free service to private landlords, people managing shared houses, etc (not agencies - but see the Other Resources button) with residential property to let in the Cambridge (England) area. People seeking accommodation in Cambridge may also advertise here free.

Largely designed to help me, this page, in that I'd get rather less email if everyone read this first ...

Most Frequently Asked Question Of All

Press the ADVERTISE button and fill in the form.

Your computer is infected with some malware called "zonealarm", which takes it upon itself to delete the ADVERTISE button from the page, without troubling to ask you first whether that's what you want and without troubling to tell you afterwards that that's what it's done. Your options include: (a) find out how to fiddle with zonealarm's settings to stop this behaviour; (b) uninstall zonealarm; (c) try again from some other computer which is not infected with zonealarm.

Questions from Everybody

They've gone. Almost nobody actually needs to see these full listings, and they were eating a lot of expensive bandwidth. If you really need to see all the TO LET or WANTED ads you can do this by choosing suitable search criteria.

I've provided a number of different orders in which you might like to see the search results presented. I'm tracking how often people use which options, and might drop any that are rarely used; if there's one you'd like that isn't there please let me know.

Advertisers' Questions

This is part of the coding that's inserted by the "Add email address" button, and it is necessary to make your mail address into a link that can be clicked to send you email. If your email address is someone@example.com then the code generated by the "Add email address" button is:

<a href="mailto:someone@example.com>someone@example.com</a>

and when your ad appears the email address will look like someone@example.com so that people can click directly on your email address to send you an email. So, if the "Add email address" button inserts stuff like this that you don't understand into your ad, please just leave it alone! - if you fiddle with it the result is quite likely broken HTML coding, and I've either got to fix it for you or reject that ad and ask you to fix it yourself. You can work out for yourself which it is quicker and easier for me to do and hence which is most likely if I'm in a hurry.

Probably because I haven't looked at it yet. I look at every ad and decide whether or not to approve it for display on the site; this way I can filter out the ads for Russian porn, get-rich-quick schemes and so on. Sometimes I'm sitting in front of a computer and check and approve ads within minutes of them being submitted; sometimes I'm doing other things and you might have to wait for many hours.

No. At present you get an automatic email when you submit the ad, and if I reject the ad you'll get an email explaining the rejection. But if I accept the ad it will just appear on the site without any further emails to you. If advertisers want me to send them emails when their ads are accepted I can easily change the software to do this, but nobody has asked me to yet.

Possibly because you've put it on the wrong page - it's not unknown for someone to accidentally submit an ad to the HOLIDAY page and then wonder why it doesn't appear on the WANTED page. Please check for this before emailing me.

Possibly because I've rejected it, in which case an email will have been sent to the email address you gave explaining the reason for rejection.

Possibly because you gave an invalid email address when you submitted the ad. I will reject ads with invalid email addresses, and you won't get the emails explaining the rejection because they will be sent to the invalid email address. If you want your ad displayed please enter a valid email address.

You can upload up to four pictures as part of the ad submission process. The site will resize the pictures for you as needed (but won't rotate them - so if you upload a sideways picture it will appear sideways on the site).

You can delete your ad yourself. Click on the reference number for the ad, or on the EDIT/DELETE button, and fill in your password. Please email me only if something goes wrong, in which case please tell me exactly what went wrong.

You can do this yourself. Click on the reference number for the ad, or on the EDIT/DELETE button, and fill in your password. Then you can change the expiry date. Please email me only if something goes wrong, and tell me exactly what went wrong.

You can do this yourself. An "expired" ad is still in the system, it just has an expiry date in the past. Click on the EDIT/DELETE button, and fill in your password. Then you can change the expiry date to some time in the future. Please email me only if something goes wrong, and tell me exactly what went wrong.

You can do this yourself. A "deleted" ad is still in the system, it just has an expiry date in the past. Click on the EDIT/DELETE button, and fill in your password. Then you can change the expiry date to some time in the future. Please email me only if something goes wrong, and tell me exactly what went wrong.

Because that's what it looks like, either to my software or to me. The same person may not have two WANTED ads current at the same time; there may not be two TO LET ads for the same property at the same time. If the second WANTED ad is actually one you've submitted for a friend, or the second TO LET ad is actually for a different property (or a different room in the same house), then please let me know. I do try to spot and approve ads from regular advertisers who I know don't try to abuse the system, but I don't always have time to read ads properly and I can make mistakes.

Because that's how I choose to run my web site. I do not allow you to "recycle" an old ad and make it look like a new one. This is because it will be irritating to readers of the site who have already read your ad and decided it isn't interesting; they don't want to re-read the same thing every day disguised as a "new" ad.

I do not allow you to "recycle" an old ad and make it look like a new one, not even if you make some trivial changes to the wording. If you make important changes, such that someone who as already decided your ad is not interesting to them might want to re-read it and change their mind, such as a (significantly) lower rent, then I will allow the old ad to be replaced by the new one. (But sometimes I don't read them carefully enough to spot the difference; if you think this has happened to you please let me know.)

If you delete an ad and wait long enough before resubmitting it the duplicate detection software won't think it's a duplicate. How long is "long enough" is something that I might vary from time to time; at the moment a week should do it.

Sorry, if I allowed people to delete and resubmit ads unchecked then everybody would do it every day and it would be impossible for the important people, the ones reading the site, to know what is really new and worth reading. Now, if you've already had several replies to your ad but failed to find anybody or anywhere suitable, maybe there's something wrong with what you're offering? You might have the price wrong, you might have other Ts&Cs wrong, the wording in your ad might be attracting the wrong people. Whatever, you might do better to consider what could be wrong, as simply resubmitting the ad unchanged might, even if I allowed you to do it, simply produce more useless replies that don't result in the business being done.