As the Craig’s List phenomenon continues to sweep across the world, it increasingly becomes a stranger and stranger website.

Anyone who’s ever spent time perusing any one of the hundreds of regional versions of Craig’s List can probably attest to the fact that it’s an amazing resource if you’re in the market for some used furniture, a new apartment, a new job, or a myriad of other things. It can get bizarre, but that’s probably to be expected — after all, it’s free.

But just when it seemed that the free-for-all site was close to finishing its transformation from an underground meeting place to an up-and-up mainstream classified ads network, the New York Times reports that, hey, it might even be faker than you think:

Across the country, aspiring writers are using Craigslist not just as a place to offload their futons, but as a pixeled writing workshop where they test their stabs at social satire on some of the more than 30 million visitors that the site draws each month. Their personal ads ostensibly seek a soul mate, but what they’re really looking for is an audience.

Some … are working on a book, while others are just trying out material. Some find Internet fame when popular blogs link to the ads.

“One of the motives is they are trying to start something viral that takes off,” said Peggy Wang, an editor at Buzzfeed, a trend-tracking site that recently linked to several fake Craigslist ads.

Blog-worthy ads tend to fall into three categories: outlandish yet grounded by an internal logic and clearly true; probably fake, but funny; so absurd only a naif would believe them. The best fake-ad writers telegraph the parody but never wink.

Some ads defy forensics. In September, bloggers were agog over a New York Craigslist posting in which a 25-year-old woman who described herself as “spectacularly beautiful” sought a husband who earned at least $500,000 a year. The author, dubbed “the gold digger,” has never come forward.

And perhaps it goes without saying that the romance ads are the prime breeding ground for a new breed of prankster …

Kate McDade, a 30-year-old student at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, said she was gleeful that her latest ad — she has written about 20 in the last two years — is currently featured in the “Best of Craigslist” section, the site’s equivalent of being published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Posted in the personals category, the ad reads in part: “Due to shortages in men in the Greater Portland Area, the following categories of unforgivable lowlifes have been promoted to ‘potential relationship material’ for me.”

The list of 44 descriptors includes “Liars,” “Cheaters,” “Daily pot smokers,” “Dirty, smelly coffee shop poets,” “Men old enough to be my Dad,” “My Dad,” “The dental-hygienically challenged,” and “Your dumb friend, age 37, who still plays video games after work.”

As a single mother, Ms. McDade said that she was largely satirizing herself and the dearth of suitable men. When people respond to her ads, often men in on the joke who laud her wit, she never replies. “I wouldn’t look for someone on Craigslist,” she said.

Check out Andrew Adam Newman’s original article New York Times article here.