Part of Notes from the Road, our city-by-city series.
The short answer: Craigslist took its Personals section offline in 2018, and no single site replaced it. In Missouri, personal ads now live mostly on Reddit boards for St. Charles and St. Louis and for the whole state, and also on classified sites such as Doublelist and in text-first apps including AseeksB. Craigslist still runs missed connections, busiest in St. Louis. We checked the boards and the missed connections on October 15, 2026.
The St. Louis area’s Reddit personals board is named for St. Charles. r/StCharlesMOr4r, created in 2019, has about 6,500 weekly visitors, and its own example of a good title is “M4F StL.” We found no board just for St. Louis. Craigslist still works there, though: on October 15, 2026, St. Louis’s missed connections board had 19 posts going back three months.
St. Louis also still searches for Craigslist personals. “craigslist st louis personals” averages about 1,600 searches a month, and it jumped to 3,600 in April and 4,400 in May before falling to 260 in September. “doublelist st louis” gets about 8,100, with another 4,400 for “doublelist stl,” and Springfield about 6,600 (Google Keyword Planner, October 2026). So this page goes place by place.
Here is how each option works, from our checks in October 2026:
We checked the Reddit boards and Craigslist’s missed connections on October 15, 2026. We no longer count escort ads on the classified sites: the pattern has been consistent in the cities we’ve checked, and our Boston and New England page has the most recent counts. AseeksB ads can’t be read without an account. How we check.
AseeksB publishes this page and is included in it. For how each site handles the eight traits that defined Craigslist Personals, see our full comparison.
Coming from Reddit or a classified site? On AseeksB you still write an ad in your own words, but you choose who can see it, by gender and age; someone can send one message per post until you reply; and no photo or real name is needed. Posting, browsing, and replying are free. How AseeksB works.
“doublelist st louis” gets about 8,100 searches a month, up 22% on last year, and “doublelist stl” about 4,400, up 50%. Elsewhere in Missouri, Springfield gets about 6,600; Kansas City about 6,600, up 50%; Columbia 590; and “doublelist missouri” 390, up 127% (Google Keyword Planner, October 2026). Anyone can see Doublelist’s ad titles, but reading a full ad needs an account. Posting is free for up to 3 posts, and seeing members’ photos takes a paid plan; its help center lists two, Hookup and Hardcore, at $45 and $90 a year. Its pages open with a paid pop-up and carry sponsored links to outside sites; on October 11, 2026, one of them, “Hookup Finder,” led to a page that Chrome blocked as dangerous.
We no longer count its ads place by place, because the pattern has been consistent: in most of the cities we’ve checked, escort ads were among its 20 newest ads. Our Boston and New England page has the most recent counts, from October 12, 2026.
If you’re coming from Doublelist, AseeksB works differently: you choose who can see your post, by gender and age; someone can send one message per post until you reply; admins actively monitor posts; and posting, browsing, and replying are free. For more options, see sites like Doublelist.
St. Louis posts on a board named for St. Charles, and the rest of Missouri mostly on statewide boards. The numbers below are Reddit’s own, from October 15, 2026.
r/StCharlesMOr4r, created in 2019, has about 27,900 members, 6,500 weekly visitors, and 480 weekly contributions. It is for people within an hour’s drive of St. Charles, and visitors should give their travel dates. Posts say who you are, what you want, and roughly where you are: “looking for hookup” tells readers nothing, its rules say, while “M4F StL” tells a story. Accounts must be 10 days old, you can post once a day, and selling, pay for play, and drug meetups are banned; a first photo can’t be a genital close-up.
r/Missouri_R4R, created in 2021, has about 55,000 members, 6,800 weekly visitors, and 305 weekly contributions. Posting takes a verified email, an account at least 3 days old, and 10 karma, and selling gets an account flagged, with a ban after three flags. r/HookUpMissouri, also from 2021, is quieter, with about 1,600 weekly visitors, but asks for more: titles in the form [Age][Gender4Gender][City, State], a body of at least a paragraph, and a location in Missouri or within 30 miles of it. Missouri’s swingers have a statewide board too, r/Missouriswingers3, with about 65,000 members and 18,000 weekly visitors; for how swinger boards and sites work, see our guide to swinger apps.
We found no Reddit personals board just for Kansas City or Springfield, so people there post on the statewide boards above. Kansas City’s Craigslist missed connections are covered below, and Springfield gets about 6,600 Doublelist searches a month.
Craigslist still runs missed connections in Missouri, under Community. On October 15, 2026, St. Louis’s board had 19 posts going back three months, 2 of them really ads, and Kansas City’s had 7, 2 of them ads. “st louis missed connections” gets about 170 searches a month (Google Keyword Planner, October 2026). That is a snapshot from one day, not a measure of the whole site.
AseeksB has a missed connections category too: say where and when, and only the audience you choose can see the post. For how to write one that the right person will recognize, see our guide to missed connections.
Beyond the apps. Smitten Singles has run classic speed dating by age range in St. Louis, with timed rounds and a mixer afterward. For more ways to meet people, with or without an app, see our guide to alternatives to dating apps.
Missouri’s personal ads are much older than Craigslist. On October 17, 1882, the Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, in central Missouri, ran this:
“WANTED—A young man of moral habits wishes a young lady correspondent. Object matrimony. Address, S. Martin, Silver City, New Mexico.”
Sedalia Weekly Bazoo, October 17, 1882. Read the adSilver City was a young mining town in the New Mexico Territory then, and a Missouri paper reached far more readers than a frontier town could.
A century later, St. Louis read personals in the Riverfront Times, the alt-weekly Ray Hartmann founded in 1977; they ran from 1979 into the 1990s. In October 1992, a woman named Marian paid $50 for an ad listing “dance music, exploring the countryside, cafe, eclecticism, rubber chickens.” Respondents called an extension and paid a few dollars a minute, and of her 19 replies, she chose Bill’s; they met at a Mexican restaurant in Westport Plaza, the paper recalled in 2021. More in our history of personal ads and The Personals Archive.
Missouri is wide: Kansas City is about 250 miles from St. Louis by road, and the statewide boards cover all of it. Every AseeksB post shows how far away it was posted, and anyone can search by distance.
One honest difference: AseeksB ads can only be read inside the app after signing up, unlike Craigslist’s missed connections and most of the classified sites above. That is the trade for choosing exactly who sees each post.
Every post makes AseeksB busier for the next person in Missouri. Post what you’re looking for, and if there’s a feature you’d want, tell us through the app, from the profile tab; we’d love to hear it.
Text-first personal ads for St. Louis and the rest of Missouri, in your own words, with distance and other controls in Supporter.
Craigslist took its Personals section offline in the US on March 22, 2018, after Congress passed FOSTA, including in Missouri. People there now post on Reddit boards for St. Charles and St. Louis and for the whole state, on classified-style sites such as Doublelist, in Locanto’s personals section, and in text-first apps such as AseeksB. The options differ mainly in who can read your ad and how replies reach you.
Not by that name. The St. Louis area’s personals board is r/StCharlesMOr4r, for people within an hour’s drive of St. Charles, with about 6,500 weekly visitors in October 2026; r/Missouri_R4R and r/HookUpMissouri cover the whole state.
No. Craigslist took Personals offline across the US on March 22, 2018, St. Louis included, though “craigslist st louis personals” still averages about 1,600 Google searches a month. It still runs missed connections, under Community: on October 15, 2026, St. Louis’s board had 19 posts going back three months.
Yes. AseeksB is a free personal ads app for iOS and Android. Every post shows how far away it was posted, anyone can search by distance, and Supporters can also set a maximum distance on their own posts. A free account keeps one active post, and someone can send one message per post until you reply.