Addressing the Issue of the Keyboard Extension

Yes, I get it, there have been a million forums about this, but there's no way we can continue kicking the can down the road.

Here's the problem with what is the keyboard, or kb plugin:
The Keyboard plugin is an external tool that many ultrabullet players use to play much more quickly. And it's been proven to be quicker. Instead of dragging the piece, a kb user can simply hover over a square and click a key to move the piece. This takes way less time because you don't need to move to any piece's original square before making a move, but can move to the intended landing square and press the corresponding key to the piece to move it to that square. This is using external assistance in form of a plugin to help one's game, which is, by definition, cheating.

I see a few counterpoints here that I also need to address. One that I fairly often see is people saying that using phones gives an advantage as you're able to move faster. However, while this is the case for some people, others move faster with computer/laptop + mouse, and that is more preference-based. Due to mixed results, this is not cheating, as compared to the clear positive results of the kb plugin.

Now the other one that could potentially come up is that lichess doesn't explicitly address outside plugins to help your speed in the ToS. They say:
"1. Cheating. We define this as using any external assistance to strengthen your knowledge and, or, calculation ability to gain an unfair advantage over your opponent. "
However, this is a misunderstanding: lichess also points out that "although these aren’t the only things we would consider cheating" when giving examples, pointing to a broader definition of cheating, which the kb plugin does fall in.

Someone may also think: "Why don't we let everyone use kb in order to keep everyone (including the kb community) satisfied?". However, lichess has clearly pointed out multiple times that they will not make users download anything to play chess online. Lichess is just a free online chess server (albeit the best one). So keeping the kb plugin also goes against lichess's own values.

kb itself has resulted in a sort of split in the ultrabullet chess community. Specifically, many people are leaving ultrabullet due to the kb users. This was seen famously when Penguingim1 quit ultrabullet due to kb users, but has also been seen throughout the general forums, an example being one that was made today:
https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/after-6-years-on-lichess-might-finally-switch-because-of-abuse-of-keyboard-extension. This is a spiraling effect. As more non-kb people leave ultrabullet, the proportion of kb users rises, prompting more people to leave in a cascading loop, and leaving ultrabullet in a situation where you need to download a plugin to play it well. Now that is both against lichess's values, as discussed before, as well as showing itself as a cheating tool.

kb is clearly cheating, and the effects of it are getting worse, as explained before. I think the only way to solve this is to outlaw the kb extension. The public opinion of the kb extension has slowly been getting worse, and I think it's time we, as a whole (lichess mods and users) take a step to eliminate it from the ranks of lichess users. Sure, some kb players will quit, but the result will be overall fairer gameplay in a continually expanding playerbase - a positive effect regardless.

Let's not delay this and make the decision. Lots of users are sick of waiting in this huge controversy that is simply unable to come to a conclusion

I'm just bumping this because the forums generally tend to be inactive between 12 and 6 EDT.

But how do we detect kb players?

@A_0123456
But Thibault has explicitly said in previous discussions that he's perfectly happy with kb. There's simply no point in saying it's clearly cheating, and giving examples of what the new ToS might look like, when it's not cheating.

I agree. The thing which is most annoying with keyboard is that when your opponent gets to around 0.5 seconds, they hover their mouse around there king. They have no control where they are going, which means they arent even playing chess, instead moving their mouse as quick as they can.

@Doofenshmirtz said in #4:

@A_0123456
But Thibault has explicitly said in previous discussions that he's perfectly happy with kb. There's simply no point in saying it's clearly cheating, and giving examples of what the new ToS might look like, when it's not cheating.

Where exactly?

@passionate_player said in #3:

But how do we detect kb players?
There are some patterns with kb players that are possible to be detected, but I'm not too familiar with them.

@Doofenshmirtz
KB is a external tool that allows you to have a clear definition of cheating.

It litteraly allows you to have multiple premoves a feature that lichess dosent have.
It’s litteraly hacking, not only does it multiply a feature lichess have, having to drag the pieces into just clicking random sqaures and all the keys on the keyboard* but it also has a external feature, the acess of a feature lichess already has**.

*before you say it’s using a feature, let’s take example from one of my favourite games. Minecraft. Now one of the main things is the damage system. People invented this hack called kill aura which hits everything for you at the fastest possible rate (there’s a inmunity zone), so is that fair? No it ruins the point. How about another game? Let’s say Tetris. Here’s a video of a guy using all the features of Tetris but “nerfing” them.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=os4DcbpL0Nc
Still fair and not cheating? (Well i said it was cheating in the other paragraph but...)

**btw it’s a github project so they can’t delete it, and if they could too many people saved the code and also they can’t just multi premoves into lichess because the 2 popular sites are lichess and chess.com and preferably users should have a option between the defining feature of multi premoves.

*** multi premoves are in fact multiple premoves.

Before things get heated here, I’d like to point out I got two messages from lichess because of me getting emotional in a argument not sharing just facts and figures and not trying to stop it also

It is not that difficult to detect KB players but cannot stop others from making extensions that allows the KB use as lichess is completely open-source and every bit of it can be used for self.

To be honest Lichess is a wonderful open source project.

Ethically it seems that KB usage is only real for a certain group of people. I didn't even know it existed until I heard GM Andrew Tang mention it in his stream. I would guess that most people don't know the first thing about it. Therefore ethically it seems at odds with what Lichess is trying to create. An honest enjoyable openly transparent chess experience for everyone across the globe.

At the very minimum opponents of KB users should know that they are playing against a KB user. If you don't want to ban KB usage at least allow other people to know that they are playing against a KB user. This transparent open sharing of knowledge allows others to make their own ethically informed decisions.