Yep you had to say your incomplete and partially true story.
What you left out and out right lied about is what has me concerned.
First the main point of my comment, which you neglected to even discuss was that the FBO had poor tie down facilities, left me to dig them out and charged me for that service. The fuel price they quoted did not include taxes and with those taxes added up to the $5/gal.
We had no problem with the part of your comment that talked about the poor tie downs. If that was the only thing, your comment would have stayed. The only sentence in question was that the price of fuel had been over $5. That, as best as we could determine, was not true.
You also demanded that I send you private credited card statement information via email which no one in their right mind would do.
No we did not. What would be the point? A credit card statement would be of no use because it does not show the price per gallon.
When you said you no longer had the receipt, we asked for an N-number and date, so that we could have the FBO pull up the record of the transaction. We did not ask for the credit card statement. I still have that email. If you keep old email, look on 7/11/07 at 12:53 and you will see.
But you had also removed the comment before you even contacted me. The FBO in question is the only one on the airport and there has been issues with the monopoly that they have at the airport. That may be something you did not know, but was well known to even the line guys who had told me that single pistons were not very welcome at that FBO when we went to search for the tie down. That is the issue the FBO did not wish to have documented because they feared getting competition on the airport. This all still begs the question about why the comment about the tie downs was removed?
We had not removed the comment before we contacted you. We had suspended the comment until we could sort things out. Fyi, as soon as someone reports a policy violation a comment gets automatically suspended. When a comment is suspended we do not entirely take it out: we leave a notice on the site saying that that particular comment is suspended. Then we review the comment and the complaint, contact the author, contact the FBO, do whatever we need to do, and then the comment either comes back or gets deleted. This is typically fast, but it depends a lot on how fast people respond.
The story about the tie downs was removed because it was in the same comment as the $5 fuel. If you wanted to strike out the part about $5 fuel you could have told us and we would have taken that out and the rest of the comment would have been published. But we would not take the liberty of editing out a significant portion of your comment.
As for me not sending you my N-number, that is a lie. I responded to your email request for that info along with a note telling you I would not send my credit card statement to you.
I'm sorry, I never received that email. Would you care to resend, please?
Had my comment been as you have indicated untrue then it would have been a statistical outlying and anyone reading it would have known it to be untrue. But I suspect that the FBO knew the comment to be true and did not wish for it to be seen and hence they objected and you quickly removed it based on your paying customer's request.
Golly. You keep hammering on the same note. Paying or not paying has nothing to do with this. We would have treated it exactly the same way had this been a non-paying FBO.
I just went to look to see what had been written about that FBO and found this comment on there now, I guess the FBO had missed it and has not objected to it or maybe, just maybe so many of these kept coming in that the FBO could not get you to do their dirty work for them anymore? hmmm.
Thanks for finding that comment. You proved my point: we do publish negative comments about paying customers. Thanks, Scott.
You also quote Don Shade's experience. For all here to witness, you can still today see Don's comment published on the
page of a paying customer. That comment was reported to be in violation of the policy, we investigated and found it to not be in violation, and promptly reinstated it.
So there I had to say it too. AirNav caters to its paying customers. The information is at best incomplete and the system is manipulated by the paying advertisers.
True. AirNav serves the aviation community, which includes paying customers and pilots and many non-paying business. The non-revenue service is made possible by the money we get from the paying customers.
True. The information is incomplete. No one can claim that their information is complete: it never is. We wish it was, we work to make it as good as possible, but we understand it is not perfect. We believe it to be the best and most complete FBO information out there, from any free or paid service.
False. The comments are not manipulated by advertisers. That is just not true. I am sorry if that is your perception. I don't quite understand why you think that, because you yourself have found and quoted negative comments associated with paid advertisers.
Like the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. We pilots pay nothing for it and the advertisers do pay for it. So of course they get to control the message. I don't think anyone is accusing AirNav of being anything but advertiser supported.
Advertisers pay to get control of their listing (their list of services, their contact info, logos, photos, etc.) Not the comments.
I also applaud you for what you did with AirNav in early days. But to pretend that the feedback on the site is not censored is at best pulling the string of credulity to the breaking point.
If by "censored" you mean that comments are selectively posted, then you are right: we only publish comments that we believe to comply with our policy.
But we absolutely do not selectively remove or edit comments to please customers. I am truly sorry that that is your perception. If you can't convince yourself that you are wrong by the negative comments you find, I don't know how I could possibly convince you.