no resignation

They are noobs

Playing fast is part of the game. If you can't control your time, it's your problem.

This shouldn't be to difficult to rectify, I'm sure on ICC they have something like if you disconnect from the game, you automatically loose. It happens a lot that the connections are not good and I'm waiting for my opponents time to run out and then all of a sudden we get connected again and I only have 5 seconds left !

Generally if a player disconnects from the site and doesn't make a move in a certain amount of time, you are given the option to claim victory.

There are, however, a few known glitches to that. However the devs, I believe, don't want to simply force win on disconnect due to the international nature of the site.

@galaxie-500
Then this wouldn't allow simuls, informal or otherwise. Correspondence games also have to be taken in question.

@l33t_5l4ck3r
Such a system is already in place. It detects whether the connection's been simply lost or if the tab was forcibly closed or lost focus. That's how it pops up the Claim victory/draw buttons, at times.

The best thing you can do right now is to leave a note on their page to warn others about their poor lack of courtesy. Head to the offending player's profile page, click notes at the top, and add one. Your friends can see the note and be more vigilant in their choice of opponent.

I have the solution!

When players are thinking in otb games, they often like to fiddle with captured pieces, the extra queen, whathaveyou. So add a little animated piece to the side of the board that says *click while thinking* that twirls around when you click. Then if a player doesn't interact with a board for over 2 minutes, have it flash to click or move in 30 seconds. If they do neither, it can be assumed they abandoned the game and the claim victory can pop up for the opponent.

I am of course being absurd, this isn't really an idea. It's to show how difficult it really is to come up with a solution that doesn't compromise the integrity of the site while also preventing abuse and bad sportsmanship.

Johnpike runs the clock down and won't resign. Beware.

The "Claim Victory" button seems to handle the problem pretty well for the people that disconnect, but the people that just let the clock run down without disconnecting are going to be a lot tougher.

Here is an idea though- have an auto detection mechanism for such behavior. How would it work? Well, lichess ALREADY has good time analytics set up, so just make use of this. Underneath a game you can see a graph of all the times for each move. It's right there already. If a move is off by so many standard deviations that's one warning flag right there. You would probably want to set the threshold quite high to avoid false detections because often people use a lot more time for a certain move than average which is just part of time management. We will need to consider a few other parameters So to start we could limit it to just looking at moves that ended the game by time running out and not longer taking moves within the game. Also, another flag would be if the last move, in addition to taking an inordinate amount of time compared to the other moves was preceded by a blunder by the same player. This is another sign. Also, it should be noted if the tab lost focus, which would be yet another tell tale sign. Finally, you could require that it form the basis of a pattern before the account in question is flagged. If all the previous requirements were met and this happened repeatedly so many times in so many games that would definitely demonstrate a pattern of behavior so that only then you could send them an automatic warning.
I would suggest also that if the behavior continued after that that there could be a human review and appropriate action taken if if the behavior continued. I WOULD suggest this but I don't know if any idea that required ongoing human effort by the lichess team of volunteers is a non starter. At the very least you could have the auto detection system combined with a certain amount of complaints by other players via a report/flag button to result in account suspensions for people that repeatedly did this, because this really is a discourteous and annoying practice that takes away from the overall experience of your great website.
So, can any of the mod's or programmers tell me why this approach wouldn't work? I know you guys have a lot of things to do and you aren't paid so if it's just a matter of getting to it, that's cool. :)

I don't see the problem with letting one's time run out. It's their time and they have the right to do whatever they want with it. One should expect to sit through the full time limit if they have to, moves made or not.

"..because this really is a discourteous and annoying practice,"

Really? I mean yeah I agree, but c'mon. My nit-picking detector is detecting seismic activity.

Just another thought, if this hasn't already been mentioned, about what action could be taken against this type of player. At first I was thinking account suspension, but now it occurs to me there's a gentler approach that could be taken. You could have a feature where if it appears they letting the time run out in a lost game, that their opponent is given the opportunity to 'claim victory', just as if they had disconnected. Again this would only be for people that have been sufficiently identified as those who deliberately lets their clock run down when they start loosing after being given a warning.
An additional benefit of this approach would be that if this button ends up being pressed enough times by different opponents, this in itself would be even further evidence against the player in question in consideration of suspending their account.