Rapid moves from opponents who are not "online" -- cheating

Some bots were discontinued at the request of Chess.com

Yeah. I wish I had blocks of time to devote to live chess, but I don't. :(

I would hope so. But at least a couple look difficult to detect as they spoof a browser.

The more viable solution is to code the endpoints for chess.com's backend such that bots would not be possible.

This wasn't always the case, and someone could easily be using an out-of-date version.

Anyway, don't worry about cheating. There are many more honest people here than cheaters.

Zigwurst -- this seems to be more prevalent in team matches. 

@Skeptic then play your best chess and if an alleged cheater has a 1500 rating, then they must not be doing it very well.

Yeah, I thought about that... especially since the "suspect" appeared to be a woman. 

It's the near-simultaneous pace of moves in many games, near-immediate response to all of my moves, and high volume of active games that got my suspicious up. That's when I started searching for bots, and found several.

From the comments I saw, the "strategy" with these bots is to generate a game history that is not suspicious. Then, in tournaments and team matches -- when it counts -- turn the bot playing-level up to get wins.

I've been online a long time -- and the effort people put into artificially increasing an arbitrary score associated with an anonymous online pseudonym still amazes me.

Bots that play correspondence chess? I thought that bots only play live chess.

This seems like a lot of wild conclusions for a purported skeptic.

Fixed.

Have you tried making moves at different times during the day and still get the immediate responses?

That's one of the reasons I started playing blitz. I can usually squeeze a few games into a 30 minute block of time.  More if I'm getting my butt kicked. 

That's what I thought also. The "need" appears to be inspired by team matches and tournaments.

Dunno... seems like the conclusion is rather simple -- rapid moves in correspondence/online chess, combined with the existence of bots in the wild that facilitate such activity.

Please furnish us with your evidence that correspondence playing bots exist.

Should be simple, afterall, you did say that you "found several".

I found another that has a public GitHub repository (and Reddit discussion), and relies on hijacking the FireFox websocket to acquire/post Chess.com's JSON game status. Fairly ingeneous as it can apparently play any type of chess.com game; online, live, blitz, etc. The same person also created a Lichess.org bot.

No... it's not a reason to stop playing online chess, just a reason to look a little closer at your potential opponent before you accept an open-seek. ;)

I'm not going to post links in the public forum. (@@)

If an admin would like the links, and mitigation possibilities, I'm happy to share.

EDIT TO ADD:

It looks like the older discussions (2013) for bots that work with online chess faded out. Don't know if updates to the chess.com backend negated the bot functionality. The 2014 discussions of the code library on GitHub show video demonstrations with live chess, but discuss using it for online/correspondence games... no video/examples for those.

 I'm sceptical of all these cheating allegations. I always keep 70 games on the go and am only reading this because I'm waiting for a someone to move, and then I'll react instantly.

 I use my galaxy sometimes and that phone doesn't show me as on-line. Incidentially I get accused of cheating quite regularly, I just put it down to sour-grapes, when I'm losing no one accuses me of cheating!