Yea F Vertical Scope

[irate4x4]

Sorry your community got sold off to VS… that gut-punch of watching a place you’ve put years into get handed to a POS corporation is something a lot of us at irate4x4 know firsthand. I’m Austin, I run irate4x4.

I’ve watched this exact movie play out more than once. Pirate4x4 was my home for damn near 15 years. Legendary place. VS bought it and it started circling the drain right away. The folks who were left didn’t want it to just die, so we dropped the ‘p’ and fired up irate4x4. On VS’s conversion day about 95% of us walked. We’ve been growing ever since, old faces coming back, and the best part is the place is owned and run by the people who actually use it instead of getting bent into whatever shape pays corporate the most. Longer version’s here if you want it.

So here’s why I’m posting. A few of our members are planetisuzoo members too. I know some of you already put a good deal of effort standing this place up… complete respect, I of all people get why. The very last thing I want to do is turn you away from this adventure, but as I’ll tell you, and I was a dev for 12yrs before I got into Customs Software and SaaS management, running a forum is not the cakewalk it looks like from the outside. It’s live servers, dev servers, spam waves, moderation drama, social media sides, legal headaches (especially if you’re global) and the occasional 3am “site’s down” texts that turns your weekend into a fire drill. Standing one up is the easy part. Keeping it breathing for years is the part nobody warns you about.

So here’s the offer: come set up shop in the Isuzu forum on irate4x4 instead. It’s already set up and gets a lot less traffic than pirate4x4 did back in the day. We’d more than welcome your community to take it over. If the two admins here and the awesome mod everybody liked from planetisuzoo (forgot his name) wants to come over, you all can have mod rights right there. No rebuilding from scratch, no infrastructure headache. Honestly it’s about as painless a move as you’ll find… you basically walk in the door and the lights are already on. And any vendors who were supporting your community …First year of vendor access at irate4x4 is on the house to help encourage them to move as well. They keep their customers, you keep your resources, nobody loses their connections in the shuffle. Long-format content like forums is falling by the wayside as it is … no need to keep splintering it off.

irate4x4 is a community. Whatever gets built there gets built around what we want, not what some boardroom decided counts as “engagement.”

I want to reiterate, so it’s crystal clear, I’m in no way discouraging you from abandoning this effort here. Saving the community from VS demise 1,000% needs to happen. This is just a simple offer to merge communities. If you choose to run with it, I’m here to answer any Qs you have getting started.

[magik]

I figure I’ll join both, just since it’s good to be in both places.

[Rumena]

a very kind offer you’ve extended. I just messaged @Cooltrainersamson to check your post out since he pays for the infrastructure and manages the forum front end (i only set all the backend stuff up). we’ll see how things go

also, our beloved mod and first victim of VS is @MudOilnGears !!

[MudOilnGears]

This is an interesting proposal. However I have two concerns. This message has a high LLM aroma, not a good thing in my eyes. The other is, pirate was known for being highly caustic. Did the atmosphere leave with the “p”? The Isuzu community has been quite laid back compared to most forums.

Had I know the havoc a few clicks and sharing a couple screenshots would wreak, I probably would have held off a little.

[irate4x4]

Nope, I’m Austin in the flesh … ish. We have a little over 20 n8n automations that help with various parts of the site, and they may ping an LLM for decision making assistance, but we agree that AI will never be in the discussions.

highly caustic = meh, not much in the tech forums … we’ve all gotten older and it’s subsided substantially. You’ll still get some of that in General Chit-Chat and related forums. Hell, in the thread about this place, there is a Pirate4x4 mod that is a member on irate4x4 banning my posts there now and he’s not banned, I’d go with pretty chill …

Quite Laid back = It doesn’t get much more laid back that irate in terms of free speech. If you’re the type that avoids a place because they allow discussions about {fill_in_the_blank_polarizing_topic} … we’re not the place for you. We’re big fans of being an adult … so don’t click into topics that may piss you off … me and mods are not there to make it your experience…use the Ignore feature on our site. It’s not our job to protect you from those you disagree with.

Our Basic Code of Conduct:
It’s impossible to write clear cut rules on what’s acceptable and what is not these days. You need to act like a respectful adult here. To further moderate content we’ll be using this campfire analogy: Would you bring up this topic or comment sitting at a campfire with total strangers?

Thats worked pretty good for us so far …

[Cooltrainersamson]

Hiya!

I’m CoolTrainerSamson, and I’m the one that came to irate4x4.com to say hi and tell our story. I hope that in no way comes off as attempting to scalp members, because I was not. I think it’s really important for communities to find the right spots on the internet and be in touch. We’re all people at the end of the day.

This is a really kind and honestly awesome offer considering everything that’s happened with our community over the last week. However, I cannot give you an answer to this because I think that I would be perpetuating the same kind of issues (issues with the people who own the space that your community uses on the internet) if I were to unilaterally make a decision. So, I’m going to ultimately put up a poll for the community to decide on this as a whole.

However, I do have thoughts and would like to take the time to thoughtfully respond to you:

Splintering

I think that you’re right. Splintering a community over and over again is just going to give us too many disparate places to congregate and track. This has already happened with PlanetIsuzoo once. So, I can see the appeal of not wanting to have to deal with that again. If for some reason this goes tits up, it would makn ea lot of sense for us to be over at irate4x4. However, I do worry that without the Isuzu in the name, that it’s not going to be as easy for folks to find us. Most Isuzu people, at least speaking for myself and my observations, aren’t actually 4x4 offroading people. Most of the time, it’s like your average Joe who just wants to ask some people a one-off question. I won’t pretend to know how it would actually pan out if someone in that position were to actually find the sub-community on irate or not, but I would assume it would be harder to find us for an already small community of people that like these vehicles.

Overhead

This one is interesting to me because, well, it comes out of my pocket lol.
Currently the cost in negligible. I DO have to figure out how to make the PayPal donation tracker work- but that’s also because this site got put up in a matter of 3 days time.
Which brings me to my only real response to you, which is that as far as putting up a site and managing the codebase as well as the network infrastructure… well… we do have that part covered. Rumena and I’s jobs is essentially this kinda stuff or adjacent enough.

The more appealing part of this, as I’ve said, is the cost. But currently it costs us less than $60 a month to post up here, and I’m fine with that coming out of my own pockets for the time being. As far as scaling goes? Now that’s the linchpin here, honestly. I don’t know exactly how expensive costs will scale with memory needs and someone on your forum already brought it up when talking about vscope, which is that data centers will most likely drive up the cost of memory. BUT, that can also be one of those “we’ll cross that bitch when we get to it” moments.

My single question to you

This is a kind offer, and I am actually very open to it / not opposed to it, just as you are in no way encouraging us to abandon our efforts here. I think we see eye to eye ultimately. But, my question is this:

Assume that we would like to continue here, and then for whatever reason, this here fails.
(I honestly can’t think of many scenarios where this fails but I want to be fair to you and what you’re suggesting here).

Would the offer still stand later?

Additionally, in the meantime, would you take issue with pointing people toward us as an authority on Isuzu enthusiast knowledge while we point people to irate4x4.com for specialist off-road knowledge that we may not have?

Again, none of this is meant to be construed as oppositional and I’m very hopeful that our communities can point toward each other and share knowledge resources. But, I am not the leader of this community- I don’t think we really have one and that’s what makes it strong. Closest thing we would have to a leader is @MudOilnGears and I was just speculating with @AuDmax about how he may actually not want to be a moderator here because of how he could finally just be a participant.

So, I’ll leave it up to this community to decide.

Do we move our community to Irate4x4.com (Please read the thread for discussions before voting)

• Yes
• No

[magik]

I think for off-roading I’ll be looking at irate4x4 for stuff, the Isuzu specific stuff I’d stay here for, like @Cooltrainersamson said.

[MudOilnGears]

I didn’t mean you are an llm, I meant it sounded like an LLM was used to write the message.

[irate4x4]

I fully admit I didn’t dive deep into the posts on planetisuzoo, i seen what looks like a 4x4 group pic at the top and based off people in our offroad forum suggesting it … i thought you were mostly a 4x4 forum. If you’re general Isuzu they yea, I get why you’d want to stay here. Of course you can always move there later. I’ve seen people try to move forums from multiple spin offs before and thats just dispurses the community … my offer was to head that off like I did setting up advbikes for that community that met the same fate.

As far as sending people here, I have no plan to axe your post there but I’m not going to have my mods filter people to here for general stuff. That may read ignorant but it’s not meant to be, we have a lot of car guys that post about their everyday rigs as well. It’s just a car guy thing …

Glad you got the setup going, DM me if you have questions

[Cooltrainersamson]

Heya, thanks a lot. We will definitely be filtering people over there for 4x4 specialized knowledge if we don’t have it. And again thanks for the camaraderie with our community. If things don’t work out here I can guarantee you’ll see some of us over there. If things do work out over here… I can guarantee that you’ll see some of us over there

[Fvscope]

Personally, I feel the vibes on each forum are much different. The 4x4 community as a whole is clearly more represented over there, but it does not have the specific non-custom work tech that the planet folk have. I sold my isuzu 2 years ago but I still stick around honestly because of the people. Not to say irate4x4 would ruin things by any means, but my hope is that they stay 2 separate entities with crossover.

Speaking of which I need to actually create an account over there, I’ve been too lazy…

[HambdenBob]

Frankly,and I’ll probably burn in Hell for this,but could both “Forum Gurus” confer with each other regarding an initial “Strength In Collaboration” while treading the “Waters Of Uncertainty”..?? IMHO,maintaining “Isuzu Nation” gives more of a targeted Search Engine hit for those looking for Trooper and P’Up Guidance,Wisdom and Help.. I haven’t been to Irate,but I shall take a sniff for myself.. This opinion is why I haven’t voted in the Poll.. To me,a “Reach Out,Not A Reach Around” would initially start to consolidate needed Support in the “Battle Of Fora-Like Entities” becoming the Ruination of Forums..