Opponent Used Disconnect Program

I was just in the middle of a game,when all of a sudden I lost connection. Well, that's not such a big deal, since it's happened a few times in the past, but this time Was different. No matter how many times I tried to reconnect to the game, my browser wouldn't load the window. Now matter how many times I came bacck to the home page, it wouldn't do anything when I clicked on the 'play live chess'. just sat there, didnt load or anything.  I've got broadband, so I know it's not my connection, but I do know, that this site has allowed players to abuse it, by using programs such as what was used on me,a short while ago, to roam freely. I loved this site when it first started off in beta. It was a big relief from the program users of pogo, but now, it seems that a lot of the pogo chess crowd,(especially the program users), have migrated to this site.  Might just be time to look for another upstart, chess site... WARNING!!! Avoid [naming & shaming not allowed -- MOD]

If it really happened as you describe (and I have no reason to think you're just making something up ...), I find this to be an incredible story! I didn't even know that was technically possible!

Disconnects are serious business, but they are almost never the result of your opponent running a program.  Denial of Service attacks are possible, but they'd have to know your IP address to do it, and they'd have to have to get that knowledge somewhere else than chess.com.  Assuming someone tried a DoS attack on our server, then they would disconnect themselves as well.  

I encourage you to reach out to us at support@chess.com so we can advise you of some ways to prevent disconnects!

This type of programs have always existed. WinNuke, Ping of death, ... there surely are modern variants?

I'm not against losing, but!!!  If I'm playing a rated 3 minute game(which I always do) and my opponent's connection shows excellent and so does mine, but my opponent makes one move(either opening, or second) and then lets the clock run down past the halfway mark and all of a sudden, I get disconnected from the game and no matter how/what I do, cannot re-connect, but keep getting connection time-outs(not for the site, but the game), then I know he/she. is running a program.  Yesterday, whatever program the other player was running, reset my modem, soon after I threaten him with the FBI.  After it came back up, I still couldn't get back to a game match, but was stuck on the main screen, until I refreshed my ip address.

i've been disconnected from several games that i was in the process of winning recently.  and also, i have been losing some games by resignation immediately after the game has started before i even made a move.

it's too bad when we try to play chess here against anonymous strangers who are playing something else.

I was one up today and in the second game, my opponent was facing mate in two. First he offered me a draw which I declined. He them messaged that it is 1:1 for him with -; and I got disconnected from the game. End up losing. No big deal for me but big deal for game of chess if this can be done remotely like this.

All that is typed here has happened to me also...but now all these doesn't

hurt me because i just play a game or 2 or 3 in live chess and leave..

winning is not must as also rating for me now hence just  a leisurely time pass only ,hence nothing to get annoyed about..

This happens to me very frequently and always in winning positions. Weird, isn't it?

Notice its always cheating when you were winning?

submit a ticket

something like that happened to me just a minute ago. ridiculous.

I too had the same experience more than once.. But it was with the Android app I ran into such problems, website had worked fine for me..I had contacted the customer support and was asked to upgrade the app which would eliminate such problems.. Anyway I closed that account altogether because I had lost too many games because of technical problems.. I have started fresh right now with an updated version of the app.. But this too is not without problems.. I lost another game today because of the buggy android app.. I was playing a 30 minute game with "nandu442“. When I got a material advantage, the opponent disconnected and let me to wait for 150 seconds. As I had nothing else to do, I opened his profile to view his details.. When I navigated back to the game the auto resign countdown had ended but no result was shown, the game remained inactive. I then navigated to the home screen. When I checked the game history it showed the result that I lost the game. I feel really embarrassed.. I have always resigned from the game like a gentleman whenever I felt I was losing.. The chess com is against the spirit of the game favoring such unfair play.. Nowadays I play occasionally in the lichess app.. A better one even though it is not as feature rich as chess.com and has very little users too..

I didn't know for disconection program I'm always think the conection is weak or something.

It has to be a DoS attack. I'm up in a game and then all the sudden I can't connect? And then, how convenient, right after 60 or seconds expires, I can connect again? ? 

Disconnection program? Maybe but also maybe a pawn mover program

The other day in 10 mnts tourney conducted here, lost to a player 200  

points below me in rating..we both had same position,2 pawns on h2 g3 /h7 g6 respectively   with King support for pawns.  both had 20 or 21 secs on clock.Have a broad band connection, I just couldn't click on the piece and move for the next 20 secs and lost..for the next 5th round there was  

no such problem and everything was smooth..

If you suspect someone of cheating in this way (unlikely as it is) then simply block them (as I do with anyone that sends gratuitous insults, or that I suspect of being a troll on the forum's blogs).  That way you won't lose more than one game against them.

Sorry, but the only way that's possible is if they hacked Chess.com and either:

• Tricking the server into thinking that you've disconnected
• Spamming your laptop/wi-fi router with so many requests (they need to find your IP, which they can only get from Chess.com if they don't have physical access to your laptop) that the wi-fi malfunctions.

Have any actual developers looked at this? Speaking on something out of your depth saying it's impossible because you don't see how it's possible actually does more harm than good.

I write Javascript for a living and specifically  use Websockets in production (I did a quick view-source and it looks like Chess.com is using Angular and probably a socket wrapper like Socket.io), so I see more possibilities here. If the server isn't smart enough about filtering user input then one client could send excessive requests to the other (a sort of peer-to-peer DoS), or, it could send malformed responses and cause an exception in the client-side code, causing a disconnection. Back in the days of AOL Instant Messenger there were programs called "punters" that did exactly this. Each generation makes the same mistakes as the last

For example, if a socket is shipping JSON-encoded responses back and forth, then improper parsing of input can inject invalid character sequences into the stream which cause JSON.parse() to fail (as the JSON standard demands that certain special characters called control characters be escaped in a \uXXXX format). That's merely one example (from a real bug in a real application). There's all sorts of possibilities, so don't write it off so quickly.