The NIN Hotline has existed since June 1999 thanks to a revolving cast of awesome characters. We've been quoted in USA Today, interviewed on KROQ's Kevin & Bean show, our now defunct radio station was in Spin Magazine. (Swindley talked to Rolling Stone, but that was technically about ETS.) We dominated the 2006 debut of Band Madness sending more traffic than CollegeHumor and Stereogum, and left our marks on radio and television stations around the world in early 2007. We get as many page views as Wonkette with only a third of the readers. (This is the part where I encourage you to advertise on this site) In 2005, we made the The British Telecom Online Music Awards' People's Choice Award shortlist. Our RSS feed is one of the 100 most popular RSS news feeds on Livejournal. This site runs primarily on decrepit Perl that was hacked apart on outdated computers and dial-up connections, and one point had simultaneously updated French and German versions. Our Myspace profile is better than yours. If you need to get in touch about the site, contact Leviathant (his real name is Matt) -- Snail mail can be sent to The NIN Hotline c/o Matt Dunphy, 162 E Church St, Downingtown PA 19335, but you're going to have to do a little work if you want a phone number. If you're looking for meathead, he moved to L.A. and every time I put his picture up on this page, he takes it back down. Thanks for reading all that. Now, to put some faces behind the names of some of the more recent folks who've helped keep this site going...
Past contributors and reports: amishhacker, anXdiety, brad, crimsonplague, disarray, disinfonation, Exit Domina, dizzy, Haze, hysteria, londyn, lou, maelina, mamoulian, meathead, mokeejc, mycah, n0thing, nodie, Paul, pimpfdotnuffin, quasar (kind of), Saturnine, static, teknolust, whitechapelmolly, and undoubtedly others that I've missed.
NIN fans are crazy (that includes us): In 2006, Band Madness launched, we were invited to link to the site to encourage voting from our viewers. What ensued was kind of insane:
When we started this tournament, we got a number of messages along the lines of "what's the point, the Beatles are going to win?" While I wasn't convinced of this, I figured that The Beatles, along with Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, and perhaps Nirvana and Radiohead were the only ones with an actual shot at winning, but argued that the winner didn't matter, the large tournament format was just for fun.
Instead, we're careening towards Nine Inch Nails, a band we never thought would go all the way, winning the finals in a landslide. In a way, it's a complete shock, and it's exciting, especially as a retort to those who thought the Beatles winning was inevitable and there was no point to the voting. In another way, though, once The NIN Hotline showed up and supplied us with more traffic than Collegehumor and Stereogum, it became clear that they were going to be completely unbeatable, and the last four rounds have been more or less completely pointless.
Emphasis mine. Nine Inch Nails was left out of the 2007 edition of Band Madness, and that's completely understandable. We've since concentrated the fanbase in similar band vs band competitions on various US radio stations in 2007, bringing NIN to #1 at WXPN in Philadelphia, Q101 in Chicago, and a couple other places I don't really recall.
This site has always been a product of one text editor or another. Currently I'm using (and loving) Notepad++, as well as Filezilla FTP client. The Hotline is held together by some decrepit 1998-era Perl & a few flatfiles, hastily thrown together PHP & MySQL, and an old copy of Adobe Photoshop. Nowadays, most changes are done while I ride the R5 to and from working at a Philadelphia web design company. The XHTML/CSS transformation that this site underwent in 2005 was heavily inspired by a mock-up written by Dave Raferty. Since you made it down this far, here are some pretty graphs.
