I peruse this and that other forum quite often and i've noticed that the folks on this forum are much les a-holeish than the other one...can anyone explain this to me?  They both seem like essentially the same content.  What gives?

I'll weigh in with my opinon. I'll caveat it with the obvious...I'm a member of the team that runs a "competing" website.

The short answer...it's a "leadership" issue. There are plenty of great guys over at Baseops but the guy that runs it has a different agenda than we have over here. Namely, he runs a business. He also runs several others (you can see them and their content and qualtiy by going to www.whois.com) that sell junk for a quick buck...phone cards from Asia, cigarettes, and other such junk. His goal is to make money. What makes money? Traffic clicking on ads or sending money via his donation button. What brings in traffic? Entertainment..the kind of stuff that makes people want to continually go back to a messageboard after they've found the information they were looking for. Jerry Springer style antics, flame wars, etc. The "worship me I'm a pilot" type personalities are welcomed and fostered there and the wannabes that will do anything to find an identity and stick around feeling like they've gone through some type of initiation after they're shit on and then preached to about "tough love" make up the core of this entertainment. The "culture" of tough guy bullshit is alive and well and those that don't know any better think the experience will somehow make them more "like a pilot" in their hopes of getting wings. All this makes for an entertaining read which brings in traffic and makes more money which is without a doubt the goal of that website.

Our site is different because making money is only a goal in so much as it pays for our basic existence which it does. Money is not the primary goal. We've now given away two $1000 cadet scholarships and the site has donated additional money to various charities and causes including more than three hundred DVDs to deployed locations. We want to provide good information and make software tools that are helpful and we hope to build a community of people that want to provide good information to others without the hidden agenda of living out their superhero fantasies and eliciting the trembling awe and respect of teenagers.

Baseops is about money for the guy that owns it. Therefore, he values making money more than giving good information to those that use his site. That's why he doesn't allow people to post links to our site in his forums. That is also why he decieves on his links section which says "if you link to us, we'll link to you." When this site was created years ago we linked to Baseops and sent him an email asking him to link to us and he told us "Sorry...your site is too much like mine." We have several useful areas of our site and his users used to post links to answer questions on his forum frequently...he finally had his forum bleep out any mention to our site. It matters more to him to keep traffic on his site than to allow his users to find information that might help them. His agenda is money making.

Again, there are plenty of good members of Baseops that contribute and don't act like jackasses and the site has some great information even if you have to dig to find it. Use the site for what it's worth and discard the parts that dont' work for you.

Just my thoughts. Others may think differently.

Ryno, thanks for the input!

It all makes sense now. I do think your right on about the entertainment aspect of it and the "worship me, I'm a pilot" type. That is why I like this forum so much better. I believe in quality over quantity, and that's exactly what we have here: lots and lots of quality. I can post a potentially dumb question and get an answer that doesn't belittle me or haze me for not knowing something that I "should" know, even though i've only got 5 whole hours in a pilot's seat while the guy belittleing me has thousands of hours.

I also love this site for it's incredible insight for guys who want to be a pilot. I'm talking about the pilot stats pages and all the info about the different commissioning sources.

Baseops does have some good information from what I can tell, but WantsCheck takes the cake as far as quality goes. Thanks for all you do WantsCheck!!

See, I didn't even get hazed for asking a newbie question!

I also read wantscheck and baseops quite a bite, but almost never post there. I agree with you guys, there is some good info on there, but it becomes more about "personal-glorification" over there instead of giving good information. Wantscheck is definantly more user-friendly and doesnt knock people who have an intrest in becoming a pilot and although the people who are presuing or trying to find out how to persue their dream of becoming an AF pilot maybe asking "stupid" questions to guys that have gone through the whole system and know what it's all about, I don't think its fair to cut people down for not knowing. Anyways, good on you ryno and the whole wantscheck team for acting like the pro's you guys are. Keep up the good work!!!

Cheers,
Raptor

The friction between the two sites is good on the whole. They're trying new forum software and they finally got rid of that retarded "findyoursolider.com" ad from their homepage. Competition is a good thing. Both sites have good features. Until WantsCheck they really didn't have any competition to spur improvement so it's a healthy development.