Post
by Roger Lancaster » Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:15 am
Matthew, I respect your right to disagree but I strongly feel you're wrong. I don't want to bang on about this ad infinitum but perhaps I could give you one real life example of the harm that can be caused.
A 7-year-old was playing, quite innocently, online. His mother, a complete beginner at chess, came along and said words to the effect of "That's interesting, show me how it works". So mother set up a separate account and her son played her half-a-dozen games, all of which [if I recall correctly] she lost, to show her. A few days later, the son was accused of cheating.
An appeal resulted in the normal uninformative template response but Alex Holowczak was kind enough to take up the matter and found that the "cheating" was linked to presumed rating manipulation as the two players in those half-dozen games had the same email account. [Of course, this would have been avoided if the games had been "casual" rather than "rated" but could a 7-year-old have been expected to realise that?].
Fortunately, in this case, the child's identity did not come to light. All the same, it was distressing for a young child to be wrongly accused of cheating. It would have been a good deal worse if the child had then been playing in a match or tournament when their identity would have been obvious to all, very possibly including other children at the same school.
Last edited by Roger Lancaster on Fri Apr 09, 2021 11:18 am, edited 1 time in total.