Caleb341 Returned to Destroy Chess.com vs. ChessKid

DISCLAIMER: THIS ISN'T A REAL BLOG LOOK AT THE DATE

@Caleb341, the original owner of Chess.com vs. ChessKid, left the club (and Chess.com entirely) on August 18, 2025 and gave ownership to me. In the beginning of September, I gave ownership to @Qoiuoiuoiuoiu and he has remained the owner since then. The club has since recovered from the massive changes and we're getting along just fine. However, on March 24 this year Caleb returned to CVC. At the time, we didn't know it was him because he was using a new account. The news that this was Caleb was delivered yesterday. You may be wondering why I'm blogging this small piece of news. Well, it's not actually small news.

The account Caleb returned to CVC with was called @FootballFan87. He lurked for the first day of his return and posted his first note the next day.

No one took him up on his request.

Later that same day (March 25), he went around commenting on different forums like a normal club member might do. I myself have sometimes looked through the forums and found multiple to give feedback on. He was mostly ignored in all but one forum. That forum was the forum I posted the day Caleb left, titled "Regarding What Happened To Caleb". He asked if Caleb was a good owner, and some troll responded before anyone else could say something.

The next day, on March 26, all the coordinators were demoted including the legacy coords, @F1-24 and @Jared. When questioned on why he did this by both distressed coords and confused members, Qoi stated that he was doing a reset of the coord team. Everyone calmed down after that.

Later, all the admins were demoted and the same explanation was given. Everyone decided this seemed odd, as all of the admins were doing well and Qoi literally stated it was only coords. This was the beginning of the rumors. @Deflection DMed me asking if I thought it possible that Qoi got hacked. I told him it's definitely possible but that maybe something happened in another club to make him weary of untrustworthy staff.

That was all for that day. When I logged in on March 27, the first thing I noticed was that there were now multiple forums in CVC asking if Qoi was okay and wanting to know what was going on. Qoi eventually locked all of them, but for reasons forever unknown to us, he didn't delete them. I was not one of the forum posters. The notes were also blowing up. I didn't take any screenshots of the notes, but here's a very small sample of the forums:

At around 6:30 PM on March 27, Qoi started muting everyone who had posted a forum about him. Multiple people were trying to get him to stop, as those muted who were online at the time had started DMing people explaining what happened (they had also been blocked by Qoi so they couldn't send their questions to him). I myself was DMed by a few people who all theorized that it had something to do with them posting Qoi forums. Qoi seemed to not be muting anyone who wasn't a Qoi-forum-poster. He did not mute people like @mjtcan, who was trying to make the forums stop.

Once he was done, he went offline and did not come back until the next day. We decided to make a club for discussion of what had happened, and @F1-24 made it. That way we wouldn't have to assign people as relays for messages and we'd not have a massive group chat (Side Note: How big can we even make group chats on here?). It's not worth my time to list or screenshot everyone, but note that the admins before Qoi demoted everyone (@NoahdeAlwis, @Reflection, and @OffTopicForums) were all in this club. F1 gave them admin for obvious reasons.

On March 28, @PuppiesAreCute made a return.

Qoi immediately banned Puppies. A few minutes after the incident, he changed his pfp to this:

This wouldn't have been reason for concern, except that he never changes his pfp. He went offline after this. In the discussion club, people were asking if anyone else thinks Qoi got hacked. By who? Most people didn't care about that yet. Others guessed that if he was hacked, it would be one of the well-known trolls. @Deflection was on the humorous side. (and yes, we put the same background as CVC)

This, however, got many people wondering if maybe Caleb was the culprit. He'd been seen with both football and Philadelphia Eagles pfps. Why would the popular trolls change Qoi's pfp to this? People also pointed out that there's no way he would hack anyone. We didn't have much time to think about this, as someone said to check CVC. The background had been deleted. It wasn't an inappropriate one, so it couldn't have been staff. It was definitely Qoi.

When questioned, Qoi ignored us. Someone went to go find their Qoi forum and immediately told the discussion club that it was gone. Others looked for theirs or particularly notable ones (like @Reflection's) and most of those were gone too. It wasn't just these forums. Qoi was deleting every single recently posted forum that was not pinned.

I noticed that there was a different announcement than before on the homepage, and went to see what was up. Every announcement posted after Caleb left had been deleted along with any announcements not posted by Caleb.

I went over to forums to see if I could somehow find a pattern and noticed that a few pinned forums were now missing.

• Mafia rolelist by @Deflection
• CVC banners forum by @Qoiuoiuoiuoiu
• Backgrounds forum by @B00M3R4NG-N3BUL4 and upheld by @Qoiuoiuoiuoiu
• Weekly arenas forum by @Qoiuoiuoiuoiu

The remaining forums were as follows:

• Rules forum by @Caleb341
• Debate forum by @TheAuthorOfChickens
• 50,000 comments forum by @Caleb341
• Forum posted the day Caleb left by @TheAuthorOfChickens
• Legacy list master list by @TheAuthorOfChickens

I noticed that two Qoi forums and one technically-Qoi forum were deleted. That was proof enough for me that Qoi had definitely been hacked. I told the discussion club my observation.

Another thing I noticed is that the hacker left all of my and Caleb's pinned forums. I have no idea why. With the Caleb theory, I can see why he'd leave his own forums. Maybe he just liked my pfp or something. Either way, I also noted this in the discussion club.

Qoi finally stopped for the day at 7:00 PM. He also set the forum posting to admins only to prevent us from making new ones. F1 contacted staff to inform them of our suspicions.

On March 29, we came online to find that Qoi had gotten up early to resume forum deleting. A bunch of members had left during the night as well. But we also noticed that @NoahdeAlwis was now owner of the club we'd made. That was weird. @ToastBread_1 was the first to point it out. We all went to F1's profile page and found that he had been banned.

That was really weird. Was Caleb in fact the hacker and he somehow knew what F1 did? But how? We thought nothing of it at the time, but @FootballFan87 was in the discussion club. We thought he was just some new member to social who wanted to know what was going on but who had decided to stay out of our way.

We continued our day as normally as one could with the owner of a club you're in rampantly deleting forums en-masse and one of the people you found least likely to so much as get muted now banned from the site. We used the discussion club as new CVC in an attempt to take refuge from Qoi. Some people decided to use OTF for the time being.

Of course, the OTFers were suspicious of the sudden burst in club members coming to OTF and began to interrogate those seeking shelter from the chaos in CVC. Thus the OTFers heard of what Qoi was doing and all joined CVC. They began to spam the notes in an attempt to reason with Qoi and get him to stop. How did they get in without acceptance from Qoi? Basix found a glitch.

So basically, if you opened the join link in a new tab, reloaded the tab, closed that tab, clicked the join button in the original tab super fast 5 times, typed "OTF" in the join message box, clicked "Submit", waited 5 seconds, and reloaded the page, you would be in the club without acceptance from an admin. This only worked if you had posted at least 50 comments in OTF. Chess.com patched this yesterday.

Qoi, however, muted them all and vetoed their valiant effort. Basix was determined to do more since the OTFers were already committed. One person, @BestsellingBeagle, had stayed in the shadows to see what would happen. Thus, he could still speak in CVC. Basix had him tell Qoi that the president of OTF wanted to speak to him. Qoi threatened to mute anyone who spoke without permission and unmuted Basix.

Basix put on a more formal pfp and did his best to help us.

Basix did not reply as apparently-not-Qoi muted him again and went back to his forum deleting. He informed us in the discussion club that he would've replied with "a human being" had he gotten the chance to. The OTFers wished us good luck and went back to their forums.

We were not going to give up. Right before most of the Americans went off for the night, someone by the name of @24-F1 joined the discussion club and claimed to be @F1-24. We gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him say what he had to tell us.

This gave us info. Someone had purposefully banned F1 (wait all bans are purposeful-) and sent him a fake ban email.

But the question was still "who?". At this point almost everyone had subscribed to the Caleb theory but no one could think of why he'd do it. Some people thought it had something to do with how Qoi was running the club. Others guessed it was a troll (by Caleb's standards) that we had not dealt with.

@FreeFriendlyDove checked on the forums and informed us that Qoi appeared to have stopped deleting them. The only ones that remained were ones posted before Caleb left. Any remaining pinned forums that did not meet what seemed to be the "you can stay" standard had been deleted. We all noted it as odd and more proof it's probably Caleb. The majority of the Americans (North and South, not the country) wished the night-shift people good luck and went offline.

On March 30, I came online to find that I had been made owner of CVC.

"Qoi" had posted a note, presumably for me.

I checked the audit log and found that he had left soon after posting the above note. I then checked the discussion club and found everyone expressing confusion. Some people were accusing me of hacking Qoi but instead of just promoting myself, I had gone and added a bunch of stuff to the list against me. Others were defending me. Others had a running commentary on the argument.

I was about to start working on something to say when I noticed I was now owner of the discussion club. I checked Noah, Reflection, and Alvand's profiles. They had all been banned. In my messages was a promotion notice from Noah. This meant that someone had hacked him as well. But there was another message. From @Caleb341.

I posted this same screenshot in the discussion club. Some people believed me and questioned why Caleb would do this, others accused me of using the inspect tool. Nevertheless, we all decided that the best thing to do was start repairing CVC even if some people thought I had orchestrated this. I held a vote and the majority decided to keep me owner so that in the event this is Caleb, we don't provoke him further.

I unmuted and promoted @mjtcan to admin. He helped me unmute everyone. I kept the forums off during this process. Once we were done muting, Mjt and I began discussing our next steps in DMs including figuring out if he would stay admin or not. We decided he would stay admin until things started to go back to normal.

Because Mjt is more intimidating than I am, I had him post a forum ordering everyone to remain civilized with their forum posting. While he worked on that, I made a discussion forum for the chaos so it would be in one place. Afterwards, I turned off admins-only forum posting. Everyone listened to Mjt's request and we began our journey back to being a normal club. I also disabled the discussion club.

The one part of Caleb's message that we somehow overlooked was the one stating that he knows our discussions. And that oversight is probably why, on the morning of March 31, I was banned.

I made an attempt to log in to my alt and found that for reasons unknown to me, it was still open. I joined CVC with my alt and assessed the damage. @FootballFan87 was now the owner of CVC and Mjt had been demoted. Before I could say anything, an announcement was posted. Almost like he was waiting for me to show up. The comments were turned off.

However, Caleb overlooked something. When he banned me, he apparently messed up. My alt now had admin powers while being a member. I went over to the members page, found Caleb, and clicked on the menu for what I could do. Surely it wouldn't work? I clicked "Ban". The next thing I knew, my alt was owner. Caleb was no longer in the club. I explained in notes what had happened. While everyone celebrated, I quickly emailed staff about what had happened. They got back to me immediately, saying they'd been informed by @F1-24 but had been unable to ban Qoi or do anything else to stop the hacker.

Me banning Caleb must've messed up something with his hacking, because Qoi logged on around this time and glitched back into the club. He started claiming he'd been hacked. F1, Reflection, Noah, and Alvand's accounts were all magically re-opened. So was my main, which is how I'm posting this blog.

Staff emailed me again and said their code had fixed itself somehow and that they could restore the club. They removed the history of the bans from all relevant accounts, restored the forums and announcements, and banned @FootballFan87 and @Caleb341. Qoi changed his password and I returned owner to him.

So today, April 1, CVC was back to normal. Almost.

Staff emailed Qoi during the night informing him that they have reason to believe @FootballFan87 is not @Caleb341. Football's IP is from Hawaii, but we were all well aware that Caleb is from the East Coast. Qoi shared this email with us the second he was done reading it and had checked to make sure it wasn't a trick.

We started speculating. Who could it be? Some people revived the Author theory but were immediately shot down. Some people thought it was an April Fool's prank that had been accidentally executed early and it had gotten out of hand.

And then it hit us. Puppies. The day before Football joined, Puppies posted a forum telling us he's from Hawaii and put a bunch of pictures of pineapples in it. The same person who'd been insulting the owners. Of course he'd want to destroy CVC.

And in the announcement, there were a couple inconsistencies. In one place he'd said "my" instead of "me" and Caleb would never make such a grammatical error.

Qoi quickly told staff about this, and a few minutes later @PuppiesAreCute had been banned. They re-opened @Caleb341's account.

CVC is currently celebrating the end of the reign of Puppies.

Happy April Fool's Day! Please stay safe and out of trouble!

Yes, all the messages and announcements and stuff were made using the inspect tool.

Fun fact: The errors in the announcement were actually my fault but after I came up with the "it was actually Puppies" idea I went with it as foreshadowing lol

Last year's blog: https://www.chess.com/blog/TheAuthorOfChickens/chess-com-vs-chesskid-was-ban-attacked