I think the other site gets alot of pub because a) They have the This Day in Astros' History thing that they thought was pretty cool and started using it on their broadcasts; and b) At the time they were noticed Ray was still working very hard on non-forum stuff so it provided a nice bit of info on the team.
I think from a Forum stand-point this place beats down what is over there. Plus this place actually has really good coverage of the games and minors... The only redeeming thing left over there other than the History thing is the links to articles, which if you look around here enough you can find most of those too.
Good point. The "History" section was actually a section that was built for the old Astrosconnection.com (The BFT). When Ray split, he took the author of the History section with him and that was pulled from the BFT. What was also pulled was Ray's ASS (Astros Stat Search). There is no debate that the History section on AD is very good and well done by Bob Hulsey. No one really knows why Hulsey took his ball and went home from BFT, only Hulsey and perhaps Kevin (and I'm not sure if Kevin knows entirely). But he did and so be it.
As for all the other "non-forum" stuff Ray was working on... well... it is a portal newstand. Hence, "AstrosDaily". Like a kiosk on Main Street, the content is from many sources but it is all centrally located. That has been the big push from AD from day one... a one stop Astros landing page... why hassle with search engines, we do it for you! Ray is a very good programmer so he built his search engine routine to gather daily feeds with keywords such as Astros, Houston, et. al. and had it populate his site. Nicely done and a tip of the cap to Ray for it.
But a fansite? I dunno. It has been the cronies on that site who elevated and promoted the site into what it never was and never will be to date. And when media say that it's a great fansite, I wonder more about the media's understanding of fansite as opposed to just a portal information site. If AD is a fansite, then the Chronicle online is too and so is ESPN online. I think there is a fine line and most people understand the difference. Perhaps the problem is that the media does not.
And AD does not have a forum any more either.