posted on Jun, 26 2008 @ 03:48 PM
Ah, the quarterly "RATS Elitist" thread. I really need a copy and paste message for these.
RATS is neither elite nor secret. It exists so that certain topics can be discussed without triggering unfavorable search-engine results. Google
can't penetrate RATS.
There are certain topics ATS does not want discussed on its publicly searchable forums and certain words they do not want used in posts, because
search-engines running across X number of instances of them label the site as something negative. This, in turn, gets ATS blocked from a network that
subscribes to these lists of negative label URLs. For instance, if ATS had a lot of threads about drugs, it would get labeled as a drug site.
As such, these topics are confined to RATS, where they don't count against ATS in the labeling process. There's nothing elite or mysterious about
it, it's just a CYA method ATS uses to protect itself and membership from being blocked on a lot of networks.