penalty for disconnections

internet connectivity is quite bad in africa especially during the current rainy season. Forced/unintentional disconnections and/game abandonments are quite common. i see you are penalising this on the player. do you consider the reasons/cause for game abandonment?worse still, you now get a challenge from someone who then abandons the game before it starts and then you must wait for 5 minutes between abandoned games!

Intentional and unintentional disconnectors are treated the same. To bypass the five minute wait you need friends. This group of penalized players are likely to accept friend requests.  http://www.chess.com/groups/home/fair-play-transgressor-rehabilitation-centre

The bigger the group gets the more likely it will be to find people to play.

I travel a lot, and love to play chess on the road.  However, hotel internet connections are often weak.  I take responsibility for completing my moves in the allotted time, and I don't mind losing on time if I cannot reconnect. But it is unfair for chess.com to consider my game abandoned when I am scrambling to reconnect on a weak signal.

if chikara has been banned why did i get selected to play against him???

He has done his usual and disconected 3 moves into the game (after giving him a hammering in the first game)

This player abandoned the game from a losing position with 3 minutes on his clock. By the look of the comments this seems to be habit. Pity cos I was short on on time and he probably could have beat me on time. He had not been disconnected, just abandoned.

I am a Namibian citizen, currently living and working in South Africa. Chikara, I have full sympathy. The internet connection in southern africa is as stable as the South African cricket team in world cups. When I played on uchess.com, I had so many disconnects that I decided not to play anymore. Our signal has the ability to go from HSDPA to HSUPA to EDGE to 3G to GPRS in a matter of seconds, sometimes staying on EDGE for hours. This offcourse in Rustenburg, South Africa. So for an African to undergo disconnects on any website will happen. ADSL is very expensive, AND is not available everywhere. To assist with your issue, please don't abandon games, and if you are disconnected, message the person afterwards to tell them atleast that you apologize for disconnecting and that it is out of your control. Maybe that will help. All the best!!!

And might I add, that not one of our 3G technologies are very stable, because even IF we have EDGE signal, it happens quite often that NO data is uploaded or downloaded. As if its stuck. So yeah, Africa is far behind in terms of telecommunication stability.

are you sure you should be playing chess online even when you disconnect frequently?

Good point. I do try to play correspondance chess rather than live chess. Will only play live chess when I am at a location where there is a physical telcom line. I have to say that the live chess at chess.com does not disconnect as easiliy as uchess.com did.