KotH stands for King of the Hill, a name given to a ritual in The Elite's AIM chatroom. For a specified period of the year (KotH season), each night a person would volunteer to host a competition in which other chatroom regulars could participate. These were often trivia-based, often unified in a subject matter (for example, SNES videogame songs, or identifying product logos), and ranged wildly in styles and topics. As time has progressed, the variety of KotHs run has increased substantially, as has the number of participants. It is often very difficult, time-consuming and error-prone for a host to try to keep track of current scores, and manage all the incoming answers from various players. Many KotHs have been ruined by incorrect answers being accepted, a host not receiving a key answer due to networking difficulty, or the host's final tallies not matching up with a given user's running tally. Additionally, some excellent KotH ideas surfaced which were essentially impossible to administer by hand over 15 players (examples such as naming as many of the 150+ countries as possible in 10 minutes). Thus, the idea for KotHBot was born. If a program was written which could handle all these difficult tasks, and provide a fun interface for all participants to view current scores and other statistics, everyone (both the host and the participants) would get more enjoyment out of a KotH.

Being a member of the Elite, an experienced programmer, and all-around nice guy, I decided to take up the task.

KotHBot is coded in C# (Visual Studio .NET 2005) entirely by Ricky Pusch, who is also known under the Internet alias Infil. An estimated 300 hours of hard work went into the first release of KotHBot, and I hope you enjoy the final result. If you would like to contact me about the program, whether it is to make a comment or report a bug, please send email to infil [(AT)] the-elite [(DOT)] net. While the program was written with The Elite in mind, I have no objections to the program being used by others!

Extra special thanks go out to Phil "octo" McCanna for providing website assistance, Derek Szeto for graphical assistance, and Jon "Ngamer" Barber for hosting the website.

This site is © Infil 2007-2008, All Rights Reserved, imo.