Cheating is getting out of hand :(

In this tourney today :
http://en.lichess.org/tournament/33lUPWd5
not 1 but at least 3 chess engine abusers appeared !!!

I've reported them, and others might have reported them as well.

The fun of chess is being destroyed like this :(

I would like to propose that either :

Lichess takes away rating and trophies from classical, just like Lichess did for correspondence chess, because the cheat detection is imho clearly failing here.

Or :
Lichess does restrict tourney access.
To enter classical tourneys, one needs for example, having played 25 classical games.

Thanks for your attention.

I hope this gets noticed, because the flood of cheaters is getting more and more a nuisance, PITA.

The beautiful game of chess gets destroyed like this.

I play for the beauty in chess, especially tactics.

Coming across chess engines disguised as humans in tourneys is a painful encounter.

Hope you can help !

Nice post. I despise cheaters of any kind. There needs to be justice!

Who were the cheaters in that tournament? Maybe if more than one person (me) reported the cheater, the moderators would get to them more quickly.

#3
In another forum thread on of the Lichess moderators said that "mass reporting" wont help.

And one (other?) Lichess moderator wrote me (in PM or forum thread), that they have a lot of reports to go through.
One cheater that I reported (which was not caught for perhaps more than 2 months) he looked 15 to 20 minutes at the games before labeling as cheater.
You can imagine that if Lichess does not auto-detect a cheater then it is still quite some work for a Lichess mod to check 1 report, and of course to make up their mind whether it is really a cheater or not.

The 3 cheaters in the tourney all won a lot of flawless games (2 of them even played against each other : draw),
suspicious move times, weird losses (resigning in equal position) and all ended in the top 10 of that tourney.
It should be quite obvious to find out which 3 it were.

p.s.
Apart from this I propose that Lichess gets an "official" cheater group with forum.

chess.com has a group especially for cheating, with 3000+ members.
http://www.chess.com/groups/view/cheating-forum

In such a group one could talk freely about possible cheaters, and also learn more about detecting them, as well as explain to some people that cheating was unlikely in some cases (that also happens).

I got accused of cheating in this tourney because I won 6 games in a row lol. Of course none of those accusing me of cheating bothered to look at how I won my games (played bad players who blundered).

@Etherii #5
Just to be clear : I didn't accuse you, and I did not report you.

I did check some of your games, and average opponent rating.

I agree that personal cheater accusations in public (tourney chat room) are unpleasant and should be avoided imho.

Alright I will try to explain this one more time.

First, let me answer the 2 points in #1.
Take away the trophies from classical - nope
Restrict tourney access - nope

As for my modding experience, engine users have no reason to prefer classical over blitz as they can cheat just fine whenever they have something in the 3 minutes range, given that they are not botting.

Alright! Now, let's move to #4.
Every single report gets analyzed carefully so mass reports will NOT help.
There are some teams - and so some forums as every team has it's own forum - that constantly discuss cheating, like the famous Cheater Investigation Association.

Does that help modding the site/catching cheaters at all? nope.

How can I help the mods beyond reporting?
The best thing you can do to help us is to submit to the computer evaluation some games after you reported, that way we will have more data to analyze without losing time on it ourselves. I will truly thank you if you do so!
Moreover, we are human! We can consider a case not to have enough proof for a mark and move on to other reports. In that case, you could report that player some days after, as he will have more games and - again - more data for us to work on.

Moving along, #5!
Keep the use of an engine away from your account as you are doing right now, and you can just laugh every single time you are accused of cheating. As long as users don't cheat, they have nothing to fear. They will not get banned, and if they are in the very rare scenario in which they created a false positive, they can contact us and we will be happy to review the case further.

Hope that made things clear.
Cheers!
FBD

I would suggest to close tournaments for players with the '?' behind their rating in the respective game category.
Cheaters will have to put some work into 'training' their accounts to the minimum game requirement. This would also give the cheat-detection some material to be checked (possibly resulting in at least some of them being detected) and would at least slow cheaters.
In order to still provide the tournament feature to new players a new tournament category could be introduced with unlimited access.

"?" doesn't just vanish after a number of games like people think. It depends on the rating deviation and - OMG - it can come back on your account too. Watch out!

#9
Thanks for the information. Learned something again :)
Instead of the '?' the game count in a category should/could be taken as tournament joining criterion.