I am sick and tired of losing by “abandonment”

Just adding to this instead of creating a new thread, yes, here too, chess dot com seems to award a win by "game abandoned" to my opponent within 30 secs of disconnection of the internet (am on a PC by the way). I made a move at 3.44 mark... and sometime after that my net got disconnected. I noticed it within seconds and reconnected, yet "game abandoned" at 3.19 mark. Just 25 secs maximum?

When this happens to my opponents, they're given 45 secs, 60 secs or more before they either reconnect or lose. Why this arbitrary interval randomly? Not even waiting for 25 secs seems too little.

The disconnect timer starts at the time the server no longer sees a connection to the client. So it is very likely your disconnect was longer than that.

https://support.chess.com/article/338-how-does-game-abandonment-work

It seemed pretty fast to me when all I did was to open another program on my phone and then return to the 10-minute game I had been winning.

On the apps, I don't think you're allowed to leave the game screen.

And that reason is that I'm getting bored by my opponent's interminable think-time to make a move.  "What does that even mean?"  Please don't ask stupid questions and don't tell people what to do.

Agreed, and what I'm specifically wondering about is why the site reads your opening a different program on your phone as a disconnection, when you didn't close down the chess.com program on your phone and your phone still sees the program as open?  Is that just bad communication between phones and the site?

In any case, even if the site does misread what the phone is doing, it should give a bit longer to "reconnect" than it does.

Mobile apps that have been placed in the background (by opening another app) can be killed any time by the OS, so I guess chess dot com devs are playing it safe by disconnecting the game. The side effect is it discourages players from quickly switching to other apps while paying games and also may discourage trivial cheating.

That sounds right, although the trivial cheating bit is a bit outmoded.  Everyone has immediate access to two devices, e.g. phone and laptop, phone and work phone, etc., so that they don't need to run the analysis and playing programs on the same device, and cheating detection is now pretty much up to AI analysis of a player's moves.

Then don't abandon games.

Between you and Higgins, there's quite a collection of brain power there.

I strongly object against this proposition. Leaving the game for 30 seconds is a fair way to lose. I understand your frustration as I myself have lost plenty of games due to bad internet connection, but what's even more frustrating than that is the amount of ragequitters on the platform. Waiting there idle for 5 minutes until finally the opponent's clock runs out? No, thank you.

Not sure where the post this but I have a similar problem. Sometimes I'm playing and my opponent takes a really long time, I wait there until their clock hits zero, and when it does it doesn't say i win on time, just nothing happens and their clock stays at zero. When I click out of the game, my game archive says i lost due to "abandonment". It's been really annoying.

My opponent can take 6-7 minutes (not always, but often), I click over to my work email for 30 seconds...BOOM! ABANDONED. I think losing players use this to their advantage and just sit. Wait 7 minutes and move a pawn.

It’s odd, but I never see threads titled “I’m so angry about winning games by abandonment!” 😉

If you can't handle your opponent using their time to think about their moves then play on a shorter time setting. Chess sometimes requires patience.

I always press resign if I am beaten or need to do something else.My telco has been upgrading locally & connection has been dropping out recently especially when I am winning when I lose points instead os gain them-oddly enough. How can we be penalised or get ltd membership for line glitches beyond our control