You feel better because you know you are a good person for following the rules.

Give them a break, they are most likely working 100% on live chess updates while taking note of feature requests for the detection methodologies. It's not even clear that detection is #2 on their list, but for sure it's not #1.

Just think about it from their point of view (a good idea in a chess game too) and you most likely find your answer.

Tonico: we know perfectly what is happening. Chess.com makes a lot of money from players who run away from ICCF hoping to play correspondence with no computers. But, they also earn a lot of money from players who, defeated by better engine users on ICCF, come here to use their engines against humans. I suppose that also guys (C)-ed on ICC gather here to show their skills. 

It's simple: bigger profit. This is all about. And the "story" with "fighting" against cheating is simply laughable (although many believe it and buy a membership because of it). 

OJ did it.

Most know but choose to maintain a personal level of "plausible deniability" thinking they get to avoid conflict and confrontation by choosing this path.

The mistake these people are making is in not realizing the larger bankruptcy of their personal policy because over the longer time period it enables and allows a degradation of the entire system.

Short term gain, long term decay.

There seems to be more than a little confusion as to what parameters are used to find engine users & also how best to go about detecting possible cheats yourself.

As a user of another chess website, I have given evidence in many cases (often involving highly rated players in yearly mega-tourneys on that site) and most have since been banned.

As was pointed out earlier in this thread, the best way to detect if someone is using an engine in their games is simply to match the moves with an engine.  It ain't rocket science!

I'll give a brief resumé of the common questions & the answers you'd get from anyone who has knowledge of cheat detection methods:

1) What methods are used

Top 3 matchup analysis is my favoured method.  You can use other techniques such as blunder rates, but the human achievable threshold data for these hasn't been widely collected.

I do not know which methods are used on this site, but I hope it is top 3 matchup.

2) All engines are different.  Shouldn't you check on several?

The idea is to check at least 20-30+ games and then work out the averages over time.  The games need to be chosen objectively (ie last 20 games played by suspect or all games from final round(s) of a tourney) and have at least 20 moves out of book.  There may be a few differences between Rybka, Chessmaster & Fritz, but providing these are recent versions, over many games the differences should be negligable.

3) PC's have different strengths.  This could affect matchup results.

This is more important than what engine is used.  Obviously a relatively modern pc is best, allied with a modern engine such as Fritz XI.  Make sure any other programs that suck processor power from your pc are switched off during analysis.

4) Won't a top GM, if they played online, be accused of cheating?

Top human players can only get top 3 matchup results around the following in many games with 20+ moves out of book:

Top 1 match = 60%

Top 2 match = 75%

Top 3 match = 85%

chess.com may have thresholds far in excess of these, to further avoid false positives.

I analysed Fischer-Spassky '72 in full. 

Result:

Fischer

Top 1 Match: 385/658 (58,5% )

Top 2 Match: 509/658 (77,4% )

Top 3 Match: 563/658 (85,6% )

Spassky

Top 1 Match: 368/657 (56,0% )

Top 2 Match: 461/657 (70,2% )

Top 3 Match: 525/657 (79,9% )

Fischer did remarkably well, but then I understand he was a reasonably strong player. 

Other people have analysed Anand-Kramnik and Karpov-Kasparov WC games along with pre-computer era CC WC games and found similar top-end stats.

To cut a long story short, if you use the criteria I am giving you & find players getting stats close to or above these, you are either playing an undiscovered genius, a Super GM with far too much time on their hands, or an engine.  Simple.

5) Forcing lines/obvious moves/only moves should be discounted from analysis

The above figures take into account all of these criteria.  If you discount certain moves, not only do these figures need re-calculating, but the whole process becomes far too subjective and therefore less credible evidence.

6) The games could have high matchup rates because they are following obscure games from various databases

You must note when the game goes out of book on a big database such as www.chesslive.de so this is a moot point.

7) I think I am playing an engine.  What should I do?#

If you are doing top 3 matchup analysis you need a modern engine, a decent pc and about 1 1/2 hours or so for each game you wish to analyse.

Choose the time you allow the engine to look at each position.  30 seconds with this method is plenty of time.  I have tried with 1 minute per move, but the analysis takes ages & the end stats are almost identical.

Find out where the game goes out of book on chesslive.de

Set up your engine to look for top 3 lines with 'infinite analysis'

Input the moves or the .PGN of the game into the engine

Go to the final move before it goes 'out of book' ie write on a jotter:

goes out on 18...Nd4

(White player name)

(19) 3 (20) 1 (21) 1 (22) N/A (23) 2
(24) 1 (25) N/A (26) 2 (27) 1 (28) 3
(29) 1 (30) 2 (31) 1 (32) 3 (33) 1
(34) N/A (35) 1 (36) 2 (37) 2 (38) 1
(39) 1 (40) 2

(Black player name)

(18) N/A (19) 1 (20) 2 (21) 2 (22) 1
(23) 1 (24) 1 (25) 2 (26) 1 (27) 1
(28) 2 (29) 1 (30) N/A (31) 2 (32) 3
(33) 1 (34) 2 (35) 1 (36) 3 (37) 3
(38) 1 (39) 1 (40) 1

Note:
'N/A' in the analysis above simply means that this move was not in engines top 3 at the 30 second point.

I actually ring the move numbers, not bracket them. I find I can fit 5 moves into each line of an average sized jotter this way.
I have found this to be the easiest & most accurate way of adding up the totals.

It's important to have the paperwork ready in advance, so you can just note down next to the move number what position your engine rates the move after precisely 30 seconds in this example, whilst keeping the computer moving along at 30 second intervals.
Once this is done & the analysis is complete, you can add the engine analysis into the .PGN & finish writing up the results.

[gid ]000000000[/ gid]
Result:
White:
Top 1 Match: 10/22 (45,5% )
Top 2 Match: 16/22 (72,7% )
Top 3 Match: 19/22 (86,4% )

Black:
Top 1 Match: 12/23 (52,2% )
Top 2 Match: 18/23 (78,3% )
Top 3 Match: 21/23 (91,3% )

If you use the top 3 / 30 second per move analysis method you must be strict in the timings & even if your move is 3rd & scores exactly the same as Fritz's top choice, you must class it as 3rd choice!

If you are sending as evidence for games mods then game ids, & the parameters under which the analysis was done are very important.
I always used to put this as a header to the analysis:

Fritz 11 @ 30 seconds per move
Pentium 4 2.93GHz 1GB RAM
Hash Table 192MB
Database used www.chesslive.de

Good luck!

Interesting development.  Good catch. 

Closed.  With no reason specified.