The original Thottbot was a
news aggregator created by Bill "Aftathott" Dyess, founder of the
EverQuest guild "Afterlife", in March 2001. Its purpose was to comb various video game websites for news and information on a number of
MMORPGs with a focus on
EverQuest, and later grew to include other games such as
PlanetSide,
Meridian 59,
Dark Age of Camelot, and
World of Warcraft. In August 2004, Thottbot was re-written to become a searchable database that focused exclusively on
World of Warcraft three months prior to the game's retail release. Thottbot would also become affiliated with Cosmos, a popular collection of
user-interface modifications. The associated
World of Warcraft plug-in, which is programmed in the
Lua programming language, collected information while a person is playing the game. Users could then upload the information to the website's database. The information on the website only came from players using the plug-in and who took the time to upload the data. Information contained on Thottbot included descriptions of items, weapons and armor pieces which web users could browse and search. Users could also create a profile, so others could search and view different players. This required the user to run the plug-in, and since not every player had the plug-in, not every player was represented on the database. In June 2007, Thottbot's parent company ZAM Network acquired the
World of Warcraft website
Wowhead for $1 million. Thottbot continued to run alongside Wowhead for over 3 years before it was discontinued on November 30, 2010; the website's
URL now redirecting to Wowhead itself. While some pages of Thottbot were still accessible through Wowhead, these were completely removed on November 16, 2016 with all Thottbot URLs forwarding to their equivalent Wowhead pages. With the launch of
World of Warcraft Classic in 2019, Thottbot.com now redirects to Wowhead's
Classic version with an optional Thottbot visual theme. The Thottbot visual theme is no longer available as of 2025. == Popularity and reputation ==