What is irate4x4?

It's the new home for former members of the famous pirate4x4 forums.

Some of us have been on that site for close to 20yrs. A lot of tech was shared, friendships forged and good was done for the wheeling community through that site. Years ago, it was sold to a multimedia conglomerate whose business model is to buy prominent forums and use them to sell their ads. They have no interest in the off-roading community, they just want control of a large forums. After years of hacks, security breaches and lack of updates they’ve driven the majority of the members off.

Those still on the site were aggravated by an upcoming and unwanted “upgrade” that has proven to be the final nail in the coffin for most forums. So rather than fading into oblivion we decided to drop the ‘P’ from the name and fired up irate4x4.com. Those of us left all moved over in June of 2020 and we’re seeing a lot of lost members returning.

This community is owned, moderated and guided by wheelers. We intend to keep the focus of the site to benefit the members and vehicle-oriented outdoor recreation. In the first year our nearly 4k real, active members have already raised thousands of dollars for fellow of wheelers in need. In December of 2020 irate4x4 launched our Parts Counter. We’re connected to dozens of off-road manufactures and wholesalers and sell discounts parts to our members. We also use those connections to help promote and partially sponsor several Ultra4 race teams. In June of 2021 we partnered with CAL4 Wheel to promote and sell their memberships through our site. We were glad to send them nearly 100 new members in the first few weeks. We were stoked to be able to help that way. We have a few new partnerships we hope to announce in the near future so sign up and stick around!

Want to hear more about how this came to be? Listen to this episode of the Wheeling Wine and Whiskey podcast.

- Austin Priest
  Owner irate4x4, LLC.