Cheaters Beware - You Will Be Caught

... the abuse that occurs with the site trophies ...

?

Not the trophies awarded from one individual to another, but the ones here: http://www.chess.com/site_trophy_list.html that are voted on and awarded periodically.

Have a look back at some of the results and you'll see some pretty blatant evidence of vote lobbying (Will_Smith, an account that is now closed, for all but one of the trophies in October of 2008?).  I'm suggesting that a feedback system would not only be open to the same type of abuse, but that it would without a doubt occur and either become completely useless as a metric, or another giant distraction for the staff from an enforcement standpoint.

I see, thanks for the explanation. I didn't know about those trophies. How come I haven't won one yet? :-)

You're clearly not lobbying hard enough.

The issue here is not with live chess cheating (much less rampant due to complications of faster gameplay).  Correspondence chess is inherently prone to cheating.  Let me repeat from many pages ago on this thread, the easiest way to reduce, not eliminate, cheating (using a chess engine) is to remove the FEN information from the details tab and also disable the ability to download PGN's for games that are in progress.

If the above two action items are acknowledged and implemented in future releases (speaking as a software engineer, this would take virtually no effort to implement), the cheating concerns will be greatly reduced (not eliminated, but close enough for my personal concern).

Well, there is cheating and there will always be, but no more than on other chess sites (or to be precise, not much more than on the other chess site). The live chess experience for instance is quite good. I think I've played about 1500 games by now, mostly with players over 1500-1600, and only maybe 20 of them were against cheaters (which all were caught and banned). I can't play 1+0, I usually play 2+1s and 5+5s (where it is much easier to cheat).

Moreover, apart from those few cheaters, I do not suspect my opponents of using computer assistance. My defeats are in large part due to the blatant mistakes I make, mostly from lack of attention (I normally play 5+5 blitz games while reading/sending emails at the same time). 

I have a crummy computer and there's been a few times it froze up during a game or went so slow that I lost on time. Do I have to worry about somebody reporting me or anything of the sort?

This may be another dumb question of mine but how do you know if somebody is cheating?

NM, You said that it can't happen to you at the NM level so it can't happen at the club level. That's rediculous. That's a doctor tellin a third grader that cheatin doesn't happen in grade school becuase he never saw no one cheat at no medical school exam. So you need to watch a few games played at club level to now for sure.  Let the doctor sit in the class during the quiz so he can see for hisself how the kids cheatin around. That's what I say.

Everyone on here cheats???

NOT ME!

Never have, never will.

That's just a flawed analogy for a number of reasons.  The point being made is that cheaters will quickly propel themselves through the club level to the NM and upwards level.  Is there cheating at the club level?  Probably there is, but you can be assured that it's likely a new account on the ascent to the NM level, and you can also be assured that the culprit will quickly be found out and ejected.  Really, who cheats just to be mediocre?

TheGrobe: totally agree

Novice1100: Logic FAIL

The below AVERAGE!!!! rofl

a cheater with nothing to gain, now that is just plain dumb.

perhaps the cheater lost a bunch of games through no falt of their own such as a power outage, or computer malfunction and they wanted their origional rating back.

personally my rating is nothing to brag about, so I really don't care much about ratings.

exactly. and on the live chess main page it says that this is beta and that ratings will eventually be reset when live chess comes out of beta.

FWIW, there are more important things in the world to be outraged, especially on Chess.com, than the relevancy of temporary ratings, i.e. monitor the behavior by individuals in the Main Hall chat room on Live Chess.

guys, cheating is a serious problem ...

I have read that download .pgn files is cheat. I download them many times to think moves @ work where I can't connect to chess.com. :S 

Cheating is a serious issue which must be treated seriously.

Which is why you should watch some LIVE games at club level to see it going on all the time. And another thing is this. Besides, look telling me that people cheat to be mediocre isn't what I said. I said they cheat to protect ratings, like if they're losing to a very much lower rated player, than they turn it on and play Vlad from Chessmaster cuase he's quick, and they just win. I seen it going on all the time. People don't think there mediocre, they only think people with lower ratings are mediocre. It's all reveltive. You guys just say FAIL when you don't even try to observe anything, so your stupid, I'm not stupid!!!