Abortion Punishments

Ever since Chess.com updated the Fair Play Policy on February 12, 2024 to be exclusively an anti-cheating policy, I've seen an incredibly large growth in the amount of players that abort games right after loading in and then proceed to immediately hop back into the blitz pool, and all of them fall into one of two categories:

1. Ukraine flag users/Ukraine flair users, who are completely justified in their decision to not enter into a match with a user sporting the Russian flag. I have no qualms with any of them, and only wish them the best.

2. Cowards. Players who enter games only when the risk-reward ratio is in their favor. I noticed about three weeks back that the amount of players aborting matches against me went up dramatically, but chalked it up to bad luck, but after just under a month of only getting to play moves in 3 of every 4 games I entered and only getting a 9/-1/-7 (or better) ELO adjustment table player to stick around for longer than three seconds maybe 40% of the time, I got suspicious.

As it turns out, on February 12, 2024, Chess.com updated their Fair Play policy. Anything not pertaining to cheating was removed entirely, and now the only way to find any of the old information which used to fall under the Fair Play policy is to read through the Community Policy section on their legal page, which has not been updated since early 2022. However, that's so tucked-away that you have to actively search for it to find it, and the information is not offered freely anywhere. Worse still is that to find this in any certain terms, one must navigate all the way to the support page and search around for the Sportsmanship Policy page in the Sportsmanship section. For those of you counting along at home, that's 6 extra page navigations, from right smack-dab in the middle of the Fair Play page, which sees extensive traffic and is offered freely quite commonly, to deep in the depths of the support pages.

Why was that information made so hard to find? Better yet, why is all of that not made public on the forums via pinned and locked topics? More important, though, is the question of why frequent aborted games and stalling/quitting were down-graded from Fair Play to Sportsmanship, with seemingly no punishments for violations now?

I doubt if 1 in 100 members here read the notice about the policy change.

I am not aware that there has been any change in the abort policy.

Aborting games has been under the Sportsmanship Policy for years

https://support.chess.com/article/627-sportsmanship-policy

Last updated in April of 2022 but had been in effect for longer.

The russian hate is sad to see on chess.com.

Agreed, even as a Ukraine flair user myself.

Did you really think for exactly 6 months on that reply?