Welcome to the forum
AF has been around for a long time (since 2008 I think). There are rules, which you can find in the Introductions forum (or look here:
http://androidforums.com/threads/site-rules-guidelines.704/), but they are a bit different from XDA. In particular this is primarily a user forum, whereas XDA is a developer forum, so we are a lot more forgiving of repeated questions etc than XDA, and the standard XDA answer of "do a search before asking" is not the way we do things here. Some bits are common of course, e.g. neither forum allows discussion of piracy or posting of illegal material.
I'll have to get back to you on titles. There are a few that just relate to number of posts (so "well known member" corresponds roughly to "senior member" at xda). But the forum is going through some major changes, and some of the user groups (titles) have gone in the process, so I'm not 100% sure which still exist.
As for "better", it depends on what you want and what suits you. My personal instinct would still be to look to XDA for development stuff, but I'm not a ROM developer and have never looked into it (I know I don't have time).