Today I received, for the first time ever as far as I can remember, an email newsletter from TriumphRAT.net (TRat). Didn’t know I opted-in for that, but whatever.

An aside: I don’t visit TRat very often. When I do it’s usually because one of my weekly Google News Alerts for either “Triumph Motorcycle” or “Triumph Rocket III” has indexed one of their forum posts. I have a little bit of a dubious history with TRat. I think I found them before I found BonnevilleAmerica.com (BA.com) and indeed, probably found BA.com because of TRat. I had contacted one of the owners, Shawn I believe, because we were using the same content management system, Post-Nuke. We had a few genial exchanges about the software. BA.com quickly started to eclipse TRat, both in amount and quality of information about the Triumph Bonneville America (and later Speedmaster), as TRat didn’t really cater to cruiser riders. I spent 99% of my online motorcycle surfing time on BA.com.

Over the years TRat went through many changes, good and bad. One of the bad changes, IMHO, was their draconian moderation and censorship policy, which I ran up against a few years ago. They don’t allow links in their forum posts to any other site, personal or otherwise. The mere mention of BA.com in one of my posts and in my profile saw the former deleted entirely and the latter “cleansed” of the “offending” information, all without my knowledge. This time my exchanges with Shawn weren’t quite as cordial. Eventually my account was deleted entirely. I do have a new account, and I still don’t use it much, but that explains why I received this email newsletter. Shouldn’t be too hard for them to figure out my username. If I get deleted again I’ll know they’ve found this post.

So the original point of starting this post, and the inspiration for the title, was the following header graphic in the aforementioned newsletter:

A HARLEY SPONSORED TRIUMPH WEB SITE!?! I don’t know who is more desperate, TRat for advertising revenue or Harley for market share. I’d say it’s a tie. I can’t fault TRat for taking the money, and I can’t help but think this has something to do with Harley’s latest trick, their “Competitive bike exchange” program:

Regardless, it’s all about eyeballs. Well money. But online eyeballs = money.

For the record, I have been a moderator on BA.com for over six years. We have a moderation policy but it’s not effected by money. The site isn’t monetized at all. We only edit posts for offensive content to make the site family-friendly, and limit discussions of politics and religion because they serve no purpose on the site and only end up offending people.