The Tonya Harding Option

 hmm... really, I thought I was being a little hard on the site, but when someone supports or allows or gives the impression they support cheating or the person who states they are a cheater that sort gets me going a bit, but, if you think it needs more punch I will work on it...

You got it, thats why I said in my opinion this was a rooky mistake, going on record that something is wrong is not always the easy path...

tunatin, I do understand the premise of the original posting (which is why I had written, "The issue seems to be whether giving Cheater_1 the limelight somehow diminshes chess.  I dont see it.").  I simply disagree with the conclusions.

Professional wrestling, as you describe it, seems to follow a classical literary theme of Good vs. Evil.  I had been, in fact, thinking this affair was a farcical version of Fischer/Spassky (with Fischer representing the "good" Americans and Spassky representing the "bad" Soviets, no offense to Boris or to Russians). 

Cheater_1 is a buffoon.  However, his postings have attracted a lot of attention.  At first this was disconcerting to me, particularly so since even from his introductory story, he was shown to be more of a liar than a cheater.  But, as anyone4chess pointed out, people are very much concerned about cheating and let off some of that steam responding to his silly postings. The only part of that aspect that continued to bother me was that a few people seemed to think the buffoon is actually a clever person.  Are his postings bad or good?  Shrug. Who knows?  To me, they're harmless.  Since he never cheated at chess.com, and, actually, never even encouraged anyone else to cheat, banning him or limiting his speech would have been extreme and unwarranted.  The point is that he already held the limelight.  Erik didn't put him there, the members did.

So, now we have a classic battle between Chess.com members, led by Field Marshall Erik,  against a person who claims to be a super-cheater but has probably never successfully cheated in his life in a computer+human vs computer vote chess game that does not involve cheating and where, in fact, cheating is impossible.

 Now, how could something so surreally stupid be threatening to chess or be seen as validating a self-proclaimed cheater?  Do you feel threatened?  Do you now condone cheating?  Will there be a greater general acceptance of cheaters in our midst?

Again, what's the point?

That was my own thinly-veiled stab at diplomacy.