i wish there was a way to abort games if your connection was horrible.. i lost 14 points on a game just a minute ago, and this has happened often. i know it happens to us all, but what if there was a way to abort live chess when your connection is dropping horribly. only when it is terrible, the server knows it is bad, so i could see it being possible but not sure if it is exactly fair, or would cause problems for the site. 

what if this feature was only available to paying members? like the vacation feature? that way there wouldn't be annoying drops every other game. 

Allowing paid members to abort a game already in progress would be a feature that was immediately abused, since there's no real penalty for game aborters...unless they do it A LOT.

Predict paid members would use to this to avoid losing games and ratings.

What if the feature were that you could request an abort, and your opponent had to agree to it? 

Similar to requesting an adjournment on other sites...maybe that would work, but then we´d get lots of forum threads whining about opponents who refuse to adjourn.

Another idea might be add a search filter for lag so you´re only paired with players who have good connections. Granted, lag stats can change or be manipulated during a live chess game and this also would exclude people who NEVER have a good connection from finding opponents. So maybe it´s not the best solution.

i think lag filters would be a great idea too, but what i am saying is what if we could ONLY abort when the server sees that we are suddenly recieving a horrible connection. the option only appears when we are dropping in and out. it seems possible considering the server can visualize our bad connect. 

i guess it could be abused if you are tinkering with your line, but that's a bit extreme and the people that would do that are the same people who follow computer cheats anyways. 

One way to minimize the loss is to make the user agree to a user-preferred points table. You choose how much percentage of the credit you want if you win, and the draw and loss points will be calculated automatically by the same percentage. It may be the other way round too. You choose the percentage of the loss you want to bear if your connection gets cut and other win and draw points will be calculated by the same percentage. Ofcourse the max percentage you can set will be 100 percent. Sp in this way if you lose a game by disconnecting, then you dont lose the entire 14 points. You lose say, only 6 points. But if you win the game, you will be awarded points in the same ratio.

Viky is that possible? Or is that a suggestion? Either way it sounds a lot better than losing the entire 14. 

you could also play unrated games when your connection is bad.

That's very true. 

I agree with alintrasit...the server connection is visible so all that is needed is a program to either abort the game or maybe give  time back to player who was disconnected...though the opponent would still have an advantage by being able to view board during timed out delay..

you are right joey..my earthlink modem(in my case) can't handle the connection speed the push to me,..I already am using a special one they didn't want to give me and it still causes me to lose 1 out of 5 games...but, all the more reason to have an abort feature when disconnect is detected...