Cheating is getting out of hand :(

@FireBreathingDragon #19

Thanks for the broad answer !

Some questions :

The 3 reported cheaters in the tourney yesterday are still not labeled as cheaters, even though 1 of them confessed in another tourney chat to be using a chess engine for the rated tourney games.
Why is that ? I can imagine that the Lichess mods have load of stuff to do, and that there's loads of report to go through.
But in case of :
1) a cheater being reported
2) a forum post about it with weblink to the tourney
3) confession of a cheater, written about it, with weblink to the tourney chat
I would have expected that the confession would haved led to labeled as cheater.

You're writing that Lichess has various tools to detect cheaters, and you write that looking at move time has somewhat lower priority.
How come ? No human is making moves with e.g. 5 seconds thinking and moving time for each move the whole game long. So why is very suspicious move time in several games not a reason to find a player suspicious for cheating right away ?

I'm asking because I am getting the feeling by now, that reporting seems to be getting kind of useless to me right now. The Lichess mods have the better tools, and suspected cheaters, even after confessing publicly in a tourney chat are not labeled as cheater.

Just asking.

Lichess is the best chess playing server ever for me.
So I hope the cheaters can be kept at very minimum in tourneys.

Thanks ! :)

Move times aren't necessarily a strong indicator of cheating, they are one of a great deal of indicators, and as stated you don't have all the info that the mods do when determining this. Pretty sure that was fairly clear.

Second, even if someone "admits" to cheating, that doesn't make them a cheater. People who are constantly being accused of being a cheater are likely to make such "admissions" just to get the goats of people like you who think everyone's a cheater.

My best advice, since lichess.org is catching cheaters daily and doing more about it than any other site on the internet, file your reports n such when you suspect someone, stop calling them out via the forums because all that does is violate the call-out rules and make you look foolish if they are not actually cheaters, and enjoy your chess.

You're a good player, sure. Doesn't mean you can tell the difference between a much stronger player and a cheater. Stop chucking out accusations every few days (because it's against the rules) and saying other chess sites are better at detecting cheaters (they aren't) and maybe you'll win more tournaments because you'll be less upset about pointing fingers at people who beat you. Just some kindly advice.

I think the thread title is way exaggerated, sorry. I for one really notice hardly any cheaters - maybe I'm too dumb to realize them or with my 19-something rating I face them less often, dunno.

Don't get me wrong - every single cheater is a disgrace, but how is it getting out of hand on lichess?

Lichess is such a perfect site that it threatens every single online chess site, especially commercial ones. I am sure cheating is like ddos. Those rival sites may order ddos (in our case cheaters) to discriminate lichess, so people will stop flowing here. I hope the site will cope!

FBD and fenris1060 both make incredible sound arguments and highly substantive in terms of what I can do. So, now I'll stop following this forum and go back to reporting abuses when I'm reasonably (75% or more) confident a cheat has occured. I'll take no more valuable time away from FBD and the other hard workers at lichess - who've created the absolute best chess/training site I've come across. Thanx for the great site.

Hello people it is a game. And in every country there are a few people that will cheat. Quit crying about it you lose nothing they gain nothing.
They can not put them all in jail if they could you would be very busy shaking hands with friends.

@H_Badorties #23

The title of this thread is based on the fact that daily I came across against cheaters in tourneys here, several times a day, and sometimes not 1 but 2 or 3 cheaters in 1 tourney.

That was a frustrating situation.
With random seeks you can block a player.
But in a tourney you can simply get paired against a cheater.

Apart from that, esp. the Daily and Weekly tourneys seem to attract cheaters.

Maybe you didn't notice because you were too busy with your own chess games, or maybe you don't play in tourneys often ?

I've heard FIDE online uses a cheating detection system that is scanning games live for suspected manner, like static time using, suspect rating differences,.... and more. Then it concentrates the scanning on the games by this mean classified as suspect to not waste time scanning everything. I think the system is complete automatic. I don't know how lichess works but applying such a system to tourneys could be an idea, if not already done.

The tournament referred to did have a lot of cheaters. 3 of the top 4 are now labelled, and 5 of the top 20. I'm going to start checking, just out of interest, on the level of cheating in past tourneys.