Solving the abuse/cheating problem on chess.com
It seems that not a day passes, without a chess.com member complaining about an opponent who was either rude, or very likely used software to win a game unfairly. Wouldn't it be useful to have some indication, before a chess game, whether the prospective opponent is likely to cheat or abuse us?
I am not rediscovering the wheel here. Auction sites such as ebay.com do indeed use a feedback system to give both the buyer and the seller an indication of whether they were satisified with the transaction. Both the buyer and the seller receive a post-transaction email asking them to grade the buyer/seller on a scale of 1 to 5.
Why shouldn't chess.com treat an individual chess game as a similar type of transaction? An email would not be suitable here, because some folks play dozens of games online, but surely a simple popup window would suffice. The window would pop up after the game is over and ask the player to accept the default values:
5 points for "Courtesy" and
5 points for "Fairness"
Just one click would end the grading process. If a player felt he was abused, he could change "Courtesy" from 5 points to 1, for example. All players would have their own public "feedback profile", on basis of which we could conjecture whether the player is likely to cheat/abuse. Over time, the problem of cheating and abuse would probably disapperar, or at least be a minor nuisance compared to what it is today.