LM title requirement and cheater situation.

During a few days 4 cheaters were caught at the Top 10. With this amount of cheaters it is very hard for a fair player to live up to the LM requirement that require 2350+ during 20 games against equal strong players. Risk is during this 20 games that you face a cheater that will bring your rating down heavily making the LM impossible.

In these 2 games a now caught cheater downplays an LM from 2362 to 2320 in only 2 games.

http://sv.lichess.org/qVYGapPS
http://sv.lichess.org/nqX5C1Yj/black

This is incredibly sad and makes me not want to play on this site. I don't understand what joy people get in cheating, as the game isn't theres, its an engines. There's no monetary compensation, so its just a temporary false boost of the ego. Its very sad, and shows a lack of maturity and care for the game. Very discouraging.

Killerchewy:

You will have this problem on *every* site. Once you start playing 5+0, 10+0 etc. you will face cheater, especially in the upper elo brackets.

Sometimes they are obvious but the most cases they will use computer assistance every once in a while, juicy positions etc.

This is something you have to deal with, this is a problem which is getting worse since it's impossible for the software to detect the assistance, you will find blatantly cheater not as often as simple assistance.

Is it different on Chess.com or Chess24.com ? I would say it's worse.

Just deal with it, that's it.

its definitely worst on chess24 or chess.com, believe me. I love this site because they control cheating quite effectively

It's really hard to say which site has it worse, but at least on this one they provide the tools to get a better idea if someone has been cheating. Built-in game analysis that you can check with an engine? Awesome feature.

Also, if you check out a recent John Bartholomew video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKkSfboLn5g the cheat detection here seems pretty quick and effect. They spotted a cheater by the end of a tournament.

@sedore #5

+1

Totally agree about the cool analysis feature on Lichess.
And it is indeed very handy to check whether a player could be a cheater.

I wonder if the lichess development team has something in the works for slowing down the river of new accounts that often accompanies branding.

I would like something like a security token (one way hash) that's based upon hardware that can't be easily changed.

That way when a branding occurs, even if they try to create a new account they would still need to create a token as part of the signup and since its on the same hardware it would just log them in as their previous account.

I don't know if you can create such a token on a web based software without a client.

This would be a *BIG* thing. There are several games out there they identified the hardwareid and it's pretty hard to bypass this thing.

Once you are banned, the whole computer is banned and there is no "easy to go" bypass for it.

Storing peoples IP is kinda controversial I think. I was banned om FICS for saying an account, that I thought was non-active, was a cheat. Then I noticed they store and monitor my IP, and then my computer is banned. Everything that connects from it will get banned. Does lichess do the same thing? I read somewhere that at least in Europe servers have to ask before storing anyone's IP.

I deal with a lot of the easy legal stuff for lichess.

We store data according to the Data Protection Act 1998 which is harmonised across Europe by virtue of EU legislation which the UK obliges with. Legally, certain data can be kept for a proscribed period before having to be deleted.

If you have any questions about the law and our obligations under it I'll be happy to answer, if required.