Okay folk, I am gonna try to kill all the suspicions and tell you the whole story.
So initially, this site was not meant to be in English and have anything to do with DDO.
It happened ~ 3 years ago when I stumbled upon DDO and I liked the idea which is what I was looking for back then in order to practice my programming skills since I hate to practice on abstract things or the usual exercises. So I decided to kill two birds with one rock. I decided to try and implement this site with the new programming language and at the same time, move this experience of DDO to my country's domain and therefore the design resemblance, because it didn't make sense to bother too much trying to come up with an alternative to what already works perfectly. So I did create that website and it turned out to be crap because it was a mess both from the design point of view and code quality. So I closed it.
Then, believe me or not, I changed the programming language again and decided what the heck, I am just gonna do the same but properly this time. And I did it and it's still up and running ->
https://smartdebate.ru, do you see the resemblance? Lol
Truth be told, it had no success whatsoever, the debating is not a common thing here and even though I contacted probably all the debating clubs and forums I could find, it was to no avail.
Then I wanted to close it as well because God knows I tried but I noticed that DDO was overwhelmed with some Indian spammers and nothing was done about it and I actually liked DDO a lot, I didn't really participate in the community but I enjoyed reading the debates and it helped me to adjust some of my views on the world, believe me or not. So I decided to just translate the website to English and see what happens because I checked the alternatives and didn't like them too much, if to be honest. So here we are.
Regarding the spam, I have no clue whatsoever who is responsible for it but I freaking despise it. And to be as open as I can get, I am just sick of people saying that it was me. Somebody actually left a feedback on the website asking not to spam DebateIsland.com. Seriously? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel ya, man. Don't let the haters get you down. The competition between websites is making people nasty and paranoid.
I'd never even heard of this site until ethan discovered it and gave us the link. You made a few posts about it before that, but I would never have seen them, and my guess is you probably wouldn't have made many more. The ball only seemed to really get rolling after eth started spreading the word.