How many fake bots does chess.com have?

With chess.com marketing campaign for Mittens...which is neither here nor there.

Maybe thats all the forums will be....iits funny if its all fake and you are talking to computers.

What do you mean by fake bots?

When you cant tell whats real or whats fake, its all fake.

NewYears_23: "Hello there! I am a player who enjoys playing chess.. Don't go on the date I joined! I am new and I just saw this website Find out me in FIDE ranks! FIDE Records:- Blitz: 2400 Rapid: 2510 Bullet: 2100 Daily (chess.com): 800 Follow 4 more! "

Posted under - Mitten's Bot Real Elo Revealed!

Is that chess.com? Spam? Real?

It's not something chess.com is doing. 

It doesn't have to be something chess.com is doing per se.

There are, at this very moment, an implausible large number of new users on the site.   Simple correlation analysis with new user count on the various chess sites says something stinks, and it gets more implausible the more you get into traffic analysis.  These players are playing lots of time controls and variants which older new users have not, and /they're making ridiculous moves/ - both in the "no human would make this obviously losing move" and "no human could find this best move in that amount of time" direction.   A majority of them have <random-word><random-word><number> format names, where the words have no possible semantic connection and the name without the number is available.  None have profile pictures or forums activity, and some have AI-generated profile pictures.   It's all very weird.  Without speculating as to "who" they are or "why", it's undeniable if you play at the lower levels that something is up, and that something is way different than anything we've seen before.

(Even though I said I'd not speculate - I think it's super unlikely that it's chess.com.   Their servers are tanked and literally daily outages, they wouldn't add fake users to their site in a quantity that crashed their infrastructure.)

It sounds like conspiracy theory but seems true, how can these players with ratings below 1000 have such an appetite for chess that they play untiringly for hour after hour and at blitz speeds

I mean.   It me.  

But yeah, I don't think there's that many like me.  Who knows tho.    You'll definitely find me complaining on the forums here though, for the same reasons, haha.

Maybe it's time to add a CAPTCHA type thing randomly every 20th game or so.

Super unlikely that it's malicious / devious on the site's part, but it just takes one grad student with cloud access thinking "I will make the best chess AI, using simple machine learning methods everyone has tried before, but will definitely work out better for me, because I will GO SCALE BIG".

If you know literally any CS grad students in machine learning, you also know in your heart there is not one but hundreds to thousands of these folks out there.... =(

It seems like there's this weird critical point where CC could not implement this, though, because if enough users vanish post that it looks terrible optics-wise.   There's a further out critical point where the servers literally can't service any of the bots playing each other (or the humans trying to play each other) any more.

We've possibly passed one or both of these.   Hate to say it, but maybe free tier should go, finally.... . . .

General Chess Discussion 

That's called "ESL wannabe streamer".   Guaranteed to be Trying Hard on twitch all night into the morning every night with like 3 subs.

Yes, it seems like I am playing bots most of the time. And the usernames do not make any sense.

I don't think it's THAT bad, but its a recent thing. I keep getting random friend requests and random players. Probably not done by chess.com, they are already having server outages.

The does not use bots in the player pools.