Airliners.net

Looking up pictures is all I do on Airliners.net. In that regard it's a fantastic website, but I would suggest staying off the forums. The forums are run by little kids it seems and the arguments always degrade into childish insults. And the children that post and run the forums fall into these categories.

-How great is Michael O' Leary
-The ME3 are gods and not to be questioned
-I should have to pay nothing when booking a flight and still receive first class service
-Flight attendants should suck up to me and accept my flirtatious advances
-Airbus vs. Boeing arguments

The forums aren't worth paying for.

Below average. Mainly for junk user forums with SJW moderators and bad search functionality. It was just redone last year from the very dated site.

Regarding UI/UX the site has really taken a dump. While it looks a lot better than the old site, the functionality of searching for photos is unusable. The old site it was simple, even if it was dated.

The forums, well it's been comical. For years it was plagued by (likely) paid trolls and spammers. I noticed quite a few that are very pro-United Airlines (formally Continental) and would flag a post for anything critical. Moderators would plot against users as well.

Then when they redid the site last year the funniest thing happened - they deregulated the forum signups (which had been capped as they "claimed" there were too many members and were working through it) and then anyone could sign up even after they were banned. The forums got feisty again, and the bullying real posters got fed up and left because of the UI changes and the trolls dissipated literally running off scared. New subscribers who knew what they are talking about ran off the trolls or they stopped posting as much. Either that or the moderators had less control to plot against users because of new management.

These days the forums are still junk and full of fake news but it's fun to read occasionally.

I recall back in the mid-2000s when I would search endlessly for photos of airliners and how almost any type was accepted, size big or small, exposure satisfactory to fantastic. But now it's almost impossible to submit any photo to the site. The rules are ridiculous and beyond any reason. It also doesn't make sense. They allow photographs that clearly have been heavily manipulated to be submitted but not those in which little to no editing was done. I understand that a photo has to meet a certain criteria such as I mentioned above and that quality is important. However in Airliners.net's case, there isn't any sense. I can confirm that argument with some professionals who have uploaded photos in the past to them but cannot do so anymore due to there ludicrous rules. Not to mention the search engine has gotten to be too complicated to use.

The site looks like it hasn't been updated for over a decade the UI is very old

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