I have been playing online for 11 years now, and have witnessed the deterioration of many promising chess sites.
I am so tired of my time being wasted by program users, I could utter a primal scream!
And the inevitable trolls who only show up to annoy.
All of the harassment, which takes a myriad of forms, but stems from the same pathological disorders.
This is a constant annoyance at every chess site.
Decent people have little chance of finding an honest game, and less of finding an opponent with any shred of courtesy in his talk or behavior.
I would be happy to pay to belong to a site where cheating and other forms of abuse were not tolerated.
It seems every site, including nonprofits, prefers to cater to the miscreants.
I come to this site because I have gotten hooked on Fischer Random (960 here).
I love the features of lichess, but no amount of high- tech features can overcome my disappointment at finding so few honest players and so many dysfunctional personalities.
Not being a computer genius, I am mystified that chess sites have the ability to analyze games, but are unable to detect cheaters.
Maybe the cheaters and psychos really do outnumber the rest of us, but they already populate every chess site.
That means that if a single site barred them, the rest of us would have some place to go, and I am confident there are millions of us worldwide.
I wish just one site, especially one that devotes so much energy to its constant improvement would consider my proposal.
Chess used to be my refuge from the psychos, now it is their online domain.
I have never once used a program, and have learned to avoid socializing online, a real shame because I believe there are decent people in every corner of the world, but the ones with bad hearts and diseased brains rule in every aspect of modern life and flourish online.
Am I truly alone in my observations and desires?
Does anyone else hope to find a more healthy atmosphere?
Any chance lichess would consider them?
This could be home to millions if only......
I'm curious, how are people cheating against you? I haven't seen this happen before...
I think this website has very good cheating detection, but still to find the cheaters, there must be some victims of cheating. Unfortunately it can not be done other way. And still there is hope for the honest ones, as I count myself into this group of people and all I can do now is to raise my hand and invite you to a fair classical chess match. :)
To be honest cheating does not occur at the 1600 level. A real cheater is rated 2200-2300.
This whole thing is exaggarated, I can count on my one hand the cases where I suspected cheating against me.
For 99% of the players cheating is not an issue. Very few are rated 2200-2300 where real cheaters begin. I can imagine that this is a problem for an IM, but not the average player.
Also I go to a chess site to play chess. I don't go there to chat. If I want I do this in the forum. My first thing to do at a chess site is to look for the disable chat, disable take back, disable challange option. So psychopats are not an issue form. Also here I can count on my one hand the cases when I received a malicious message ( or a message of any kind for that matter ) after playing a game. If this happens the delete button and the block player button is still there.
What I really look at is what features a site offers and at what price.
Lichess is very good at that: for completely free it offers 90% of the functionality which I need of the best paying sites. Very good value for money ( or I should say: no money : ).
Cheating doesn't exist at the 1600 level? How do you think a 2200 rated cheater got to 2200? It doesn't just jump up to 2200 the moment you turn on a chess engine.
The best thing is to make friends and play with them,
if you play annonymous chances are, you can find a rude one
and I would not worry about cheaters unless you are a strong player above 2000, or play against anonnymous.
I had a period I believe I was playing good chess and still I was losing, was getting angry, so play registered users and you wont have that problem.
Thanks for all the response. I believe each of you is sincere and honest. And I agree that building a community of friends a person feels comfortable with is the best solution. In fact I had that very experience when I first came online. A great chess site with interesting forums, lots of players at my skill level, and thoughtful commentary in the forum.
But lack of control over forum content eventually drove the dinosaurs away. I reunited with a few at another site. But it too was crushed by the same problems.
So I may be overly sensitive in some of my observations.
This is one of my few forays into a forum of any type since, but I am pleased to receive such rational and and courteous responses to my post. I might even read a few other forum posts in the near future.
I hope I do not come off as being critical of this site. I believe the creators have done an excellent job designing it.
I hope what happened at instantchess and infinia will never happen here.
The reason that there are no 1600 cheaters is the Glicko system. If you start out at 1500 and you are guranteed to win you first provisional games in a row then your rating skyrockets in the first few games. You may very well jump to 1800 in the first game without ever being an 1600.
Still, in the provisional phase there is a question mark besides your rating so it is easy to avoid provisional players. What I really mean is that there are no cheaters with established ( non provisional rating ) at 1600. If one belongs to the bulk majority of amateaur players as I do, there is simply negligible risk of playing a cheater.
I always wondered why discussion in chess forums revolves around cheaters instead of the really important thing: how to improve the features of the site.
That is just a narrow view of things. There is nothing from preventing an 800 rated player with a low RD to decide to start cheating. If an 800 rated player decides to start cheating, it will be a very long climb through the ratings and many, many games will be played by a sub 2000 rated cheater.
As someone who has investigated this stuff on multiple sites, I assure you, this happens all the time and is a real problem.