Idea: When a non-titled free member breaks 2400 rating or whatever, make them do some kind of a chess strategy test where they have to explain why they choose a move; someone who's using an engine wouldn't be able to pass.
Major Proposed Change: Ratings Cap Above 2400 for Unverified Players
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Fezzik, I agree completely with you and Bondocel.
oinquarki wrote:
Idea: When a non-titled free member breaks 2400 rating or whatever, make them do some kind of a chess strategy test where they have to explain why they choose a move; someone who's using an engine wouldn't be able to pass.
I like the idea, but again I think the problem is you can't fully automate it. You'd almost definitely have to have a human titled player interviewing them to be able to verify.
I've read that "lowly" masters have at least 1 gap/weakness in their understanding anyway, so to verify a master purely though interview form, you may want at least a GM. And then there's human bias so at least a panel of 5 titled players, none below IM... and yeah it's getting kind of complicated now.
Fezzik wrote:
Bondocel, I like that idea. I certainly don't mind giving chess.com some personal information to verify I am who I say I am and that I only have one account.
If you use Windows, you don't give them any personal information. It's just the IP (they know it anyway) and a 32-characters number. If you don't have Windows, you must go through paypal. I don't know the details here.
bondocel wrote:
DeepGreene wrote:
one of the most active and populous groups of cheaters we have on the site: Those that simply cheat recklessly (in Live and/or online chess), opening one basic account after another as they are repeatedly caught & banned.
Here is a simple solution. Not with rating caps, that looks ugly.
Every new player, if he wants to play a rated game, must confirm his account with the live chess desktop interface. What is the difference? The stand-alone program, as opposed to a web browser, can access the machine ID: that is an unique number ussually people cannot change. This solution is applied (I think) on ICC: to get a free trial, you must use one of their windows interfaces. If you don't have windows and still want a free trial, you must validate using paypal and a bank account.
It would be interesting. I wonder if chess.com would be willing to sacrifice it's current ease of use (no dl necessary to play).
One possible change, you could require this only for players who want to remove a certain cap (in that case you could make the cap even lower, like 2200)
waffllemaster wrote:
It would be interesting. I wonder if chess.com would be willing to sacrifice it's current ease of use (no dl necessary to play).
One possible change, you could require this only for players who want to remove a certain cap (in that case you could make the cap even lower, like 2200)
You don't sacrifice anything, you simply have to validate your new account. After that, you can play very well with the browser.
And this idea can and should be applied to all new accounts, not as a function of the rating. Any new account must be validated, to confirm that it comes from a different machine, not from a machine whose owner was previously banned. Sure, there are way to circumvent this (libraries, schools), but I guess that is OK. And it's a simple, no-cost solution.
bondocel wrote:
waffllemaster wrote:
It would be interesting. I wonder if chess.com would be willing to sacrifice it's current ease of use (no dl necessary to play).
One possible change, you could require this only for players who want to remove a certain cap (in that case you could make the cap even lower, like 2200)
You don't sacrifice anything, you simply have to validate your new account. After that, you can play very well with the browser.
And this idea can and should be applied to all new accounts, not as a function of the rating. Any new account must be validated, to confirm that it comes from a different machine, not from a machine whose owner was previously banned. Sure, there are way to circumvent this (libraries, schools), but I guess that is OK. And it's a simple, no-cost solution.
Oh, I see what you're saying now. I like this idea.
but many members don't want to download a program. this idea affects *far more* players than the tiny handful of players who are rated under 2200 otb, over 2400 on chess.com, and are not cheating. we don't want to force everyone to download a program in order to register on chess.com. and i have a question about how this would work which i wil be asking you (bondocel) in private message.
the idea of having a test is one that has occurred to us before. the issue there would be language barrier: apparently no cheaters know how to speak english ;-) so we would need to hire a couple more IMs to cover every single language and conduct personal interviews. and then, once our interviews reveal the person is a cheater, they just go make a new account!!! tada, we(our community)'ve wasted more money than chess.com could ever make in a hundred years.
I doubt many people are going to throw open their hard drives to a site that they don't know anything about beforehand.
I think focussing investigations on the people at 2400 might help cut down on the workload a bit, if nothing else. It's a small victory though.
Also, I think the idea was restricting program verification to non-titled non-paying members over 2400.
dpruess wrote:
but many members don't want to download a program. this idea affects *far more* players than the tiny handful of players who are rated under 2200 otb, over 2400 on chess.com, and are not cheating. we don't want to force everyone to download a program in order to register on chess.com. and i have a question about how this would work which i wil be asking you (bondocel) in private message.
the idea of having a test is one that has occurred to us before. the issue there would be language barrier: apparently no cheaters know how to speak english ;-) so we would need to hire a couple more IMs to cover every single language and conduct personal interviews. and then, once our interviews reveal the person is a cheater, they just go make a new account!!! tada, we(our community)'ve wasted more money than chess.com could ever make in a hundred years.
Fezzik, i'm sure icc won't tell me the methods they use to verify if people are cheating or not. and (unless you are an employee there) i'd be surprised if you hadthe data to judge whether it works pretty well. when i used to play blitz on icc years ago, i played plenty of ppl i suspected of being cheaters. and was accused by plenty of people of cheating after they lost.
This is one of those things where it feels like there has to be some other solution.
- Has anyone thought of having 'ghost players' that randomly play live chess? These Ghost Players would be programs (Rybka, for example) set on a fairly high strength (2600+?) that have a fake rating (of 1800, or so) and fake names (accounts) that play random rated players. If the ghost players loose to a player of significantly less points, the program can test for cheating (my Rybka can do this, so you guys must have even better software for doing this! However, if you loose to these bots the human players do not loose any points. Does that make sense? To me this sounds like a brilliant idea. Honest players will undoubtedly loose to Rybka on full strength and would not loose any points, they would not even know they were playing a bot as your ghost players will have random names (accounts) and random ratings! Cheaters would win and get caught straight away! This would not even be that hard to do. You thoughts, please....
Has anyone thought of having 'ghost players' that randomly play live chess? These Ghost Players would be programs (Rybka, for example) set on a fairly high strength (2600+?) that have a fake rating (of 1800, or so) and fake names (accounts) that play random rated players. If the ghost players loose to a player of significantly less points, the program can test for cheating (my Rybka can do this, so you guys must have even better software for doing this! However, if you loose to these bots the human players do not loose any points. Does that make sense? To me this sounds like a brilliant idea. Honest players will undoubtedly loose to Rybka on full strength and would not loose any points, they would not even know they were playing a bot as your ghost players will have random names (accounts) and random ratings! Cheaters would win and get caught straight away! This would not even be that hard to do. Your thoughts, please....
The idea of banning a cheater's IP won't work for several reasons. A primary one is that many ISPs dynamically assign an IP to a customer from a pool. Therefore an innocent user might end up with the IP previously used by a cheater, and a cheater's IP could be constantly changing.
However you can possibly employ search pruning by retaining a list of the IPs of previously caught cheaters. For example any new account showing up that matches that pool, you apply your cheat detection routines to.
Has anyone considered employing the idea of a 'whitelist' - perhaps some indicator by a users' name to indicate that a majority of people who have played against them consider them to not be a cheat. Kind of a "play with confidence" marker. You can make it clear that those without this whitelist mark are not necessarily cheats, but those with the mark are considered to be clean.
Of course how you decide on awarding this whitelist marker could be controversial and fraught with difficulty. It's just an idea for discussion.
bluetrane wrote:
Has anyone considered employing the idea of a 'whitelist' - perhaps some indicator by a users' name to indicate that a majority of people who have played against them consider them to not be a cheat. Kind of a "play with confidence" marker. You can make it clear that those without this whitelist mark are not necessarily cheats, but those with the mark are considered to be clean.
Of course how you decide on awarding this whitelist marker could be controversial and fraught with difficulty. It's just an idea for discussion.
I kinda like this whitelist idea.
It's the end of the world, as we know it!!!!!!
bluetrane wrote:
The idea of banning a cheater's IP won't work for several reasons. A primary one is that many ISPs dynamically assign an IP to a customer from a pool. Therefore an innocent user might end up with the IP previously used by a cheater, and a cheater's IP could be constantly changing.
However you can possibly employ search pruning by retaining a list of the IPs of previously caught cheaters. For example any new account showing up that matches that pool, you apply your cheat detection routines to.
Has anyone considered employing the idea of a 'whitelist' - perhaps some indicator by a users' name to indicate that a majority of people who have played against them consider them to not be a cheat. Kind of a "play with confidence" marker. You can make it clear that those without this whitelist mark are not necessarily cheats, but those with the mark are considered to be clean.
Of course how you decide on awarding this whitelist marker could be controversial and fraught with difficulty. It's just an idea for discussion.
Works great with IPv4, but with the move to IPv6 coming up soon, anything with IP's is pointless.
one of the most active and populous groups of cheaters we have on the site: Those that simply cheat recklessly (in Live and/or online chess), opening one basic account after another as they are repeatedly caught & banned.
Here is a simple solution. Not with rating caps, that looks ugly.
Every new player, if he wants to play a rated game, must confirm his account with the live chess desktop interface. What is the difference? The stand-alone program, as opposed to a web browser, can access the machine ID: that is an unique number ussually people cannot change. This solution is applied (I think) on ICC: to get a free trial, you must use one of their windows interfaces. If you don't have windows and still want a free trial, you must validate using paypal and a bank account.