HatchetShack! JuggaloDiscord & Long Live JuggaloIRC

Welcome Back!

Rick O Here, So lets get the news kicked off and have a gigantic talk with you guys about what we have been working on in the background and some of the changes you will be seeing come to HatchetRadio. Due to integrity, I tend to be more transparent with you folks as we continue to move in the direction we are supposed to. There are some things that I wanted to address on a personal & business level that is going to be super amazing. So first things first lets talk about HatchetShack, and why the name is now important to everyone on our Network.

In 2018 we had a large network board discussion about how we were going to handle the upcoming changes in technology. Now 5 years later, those technologies are becoming more steadily available and more compatible with devices, and we’ve had to grow into them ourselves not just as a network but as a society. The biggest thing a ton of folks complained to us about was the lack of chatroom compatibility with their phones that was more comfortable than our generationally loved but severely antique & venerable IRC Network in which HatchetRadio was founded in. Most folks who have met DeadBilly know that he works in the back with us. He’s been owner of JuggaloIRC for pretty much the majority of the time, with the exception of when Stewy was running the network for a couple of years. We had a lot of ups and downs, but the chatrooms themselves started dwindling due to social network popularity interfering with it. It offered more than what a Yahoo!, Aol, or IRC Chat could.

We decided to look at other platforms, including designing resource intensive scripts that gave us something on the inside for a short lived time span, but TeamSpeak, & Ventrilo were certainly starting to show their wear & tear & age. Juggz had a conversation with us in 2018 about moving to Discord, while Discord was still relatively fresh. We set up a test server, invited a few folks on it, and it wasn’t as popular at that time as the FaceBook Chats were, but we kept it in mind. More recently, we had ran into some interest in housing our network on a Gaming Communities server, (Gaslit), but the issue I ran into was there was a conflict of interests between myself and the network, which I stepped away from because I felt that our two networks wouldn’t be compatible with each other in the long run. So after some thought and some talks with Billy, we decided that we were going to overhaul the chat network on our own for the weekend, and well, we kind of did.

So after some dusting and cleaning, we have set up  HatchetShack Discord which will be our new network home for years to come. As soon as we set it up, we had some awesome boosters donate to the server which has unlocked some really nice features for you guys. For those who are unaware of what Discord is, Discord is a free program/app that is compatible with Mac/PC/Android/IOS and is built as a text, voice & video chat network that allows internal streaming through various audio & video stages. In other words, when we are doing our shows live, you’ll be able to login on your computer or mobile device and watch their shows. It’s very stable, and it’s where we decided to go with it. We are currently working on some features for it that will allow more flexibility for you guys who are more browser based, while you are visiting the websites on the network.

On The Network you will find multiple sound stages for The Booth, Itz Beyond Mayhem, The Dollhouse, & HatchetRadio. There’s a built in events calendar that will alert you of show times, & allow up to 150 people first come, first serve to interact with the hosts & cohosts, and even have an opportunity to potentially get involved as well! Our hosts can even conduct interviews from their studios, or on mobile, and tap into multiple sources via Discord. We felt that this was a very interesting concept and we wanted to share it with you, and the creativity of DeadBilly & all those involved got us to where we needed to be over the weekend which is awesome and it sure did motivate a lot of us to moving forward.

Now the question of “What is going to happen to JuggaloIRC?”. Well, we had a few years of nobody really utilizing it. I think a lot of it has to due with software compatibility, & browser integration for mobile devices, I’ve stated that to our team before, and I also felt that at some point around 2008, Chatrooms in general started falling off due to the popularity of Android & Apple Smart Phones which were slowly seeping into our hands. I know some people wanted to bring up the fact that “Oh there’s Apps on Mobile for IRC” Correct. However, we tried various platforms on Apple & Android, and it kept it floating for a while, but as users were getting ads in software they were using for free, it kind of dwindled down to most people communicating through the HatchetRadio Network Community on FaceBook, and because of it’s ease, we grew accustomed to it, but with the limitations that FaceBook was putting on copyright material, it made our jobs time consuming when we were having to wait an additional 2 weeks before or after for our material to be released to the general public after we did a live broadcast, and had the artists whom we were interview’s music, scrubbed from the feed until we could get through copyright. It was very frustrating for the staff.

The truth is we aim to keep JuggaloIRC however, Billy had decided to take his part and rename it “JuggaloDiscord, a Product of HatchetShack”. What we honestly truly wanted to create was something amazing for you guys to interact with everyone on, and we’ve done just that. We have had a lot of our old school chatroom folks show up, and it’s been active all weekend in multiple channels. The IRC Network will remain up and running and maintained, but more of as a legacy thing, and as a lighthouse for those who decide to reach out to us. So as to not make this post any longer than it needed to be, I still have to cover some bases.

If you want know what the chatroom rules are, we are a registered Discord Community. So we have to abide by Discord Community Policies throughout the network. You can find them Here for those who would like to go over them. In our discord are many different chat room options that are maintained by other admins on the server. They may have their own rules that are in addition to the network rules. We have some gamers on there who group up regularly in various video games(Guilds & Clans), we have also again, added 4 new Shows, so there will definitely be some various places that are ran by others on there. We ask that you just respect the rules & policies they have in place, and just remember to keep it chill. We’re all adults in there. Until then, I would like to thank you guys for hanging in there with us. Please make sure you visit us, and if you want to boost the server we would greatly appreciate it, every little bit helps!