LDdebate.com History

LDdebate.com was founded by Chase Martyn in 2000, during the summer before his sophomore year of high school. Chase was a fairly web-savvy kid, and he perceived a lack of online resources for LD debaters at the time. The site began as a simple, static announcements page, but it quickly became more sophisticated: in December 2000, he added a forum. Over the past five years, the forum has grown to several thousand users, with more registrations all the time.

On the technical side, most of the code is written in PHP. The News section uses Wordpress, with a theme Chase created. The Forum uses SimpleMachines's software. The Wiki uses MediaWiki's software.

LDdebate.com continues to receive thousands of hits per week, with peaks during the evenings of the debate season. Realizing that sometimes commercialism can get ugly, Chase promises never to run LDdebate.com for profit. At the moment, he is not accepting money for advertisements.

Contact

Email is the best way to contact Chase: chase@lddebate.com. If you'd like to speak with him over the phone or to mail him something, email for instructions. (Note: Chase is out of the country for this semester, so email really is the only good option for contacting him.)