no resignation

I'm sure this has been brought up time and time again. I'm a new user at this site and appreciate a free site that has good graphics and is well run. However, in the few days I've been playing, I've noticed a great number of players who just don't resign. They disconnect. I don't know if this is true, but I had one player who kept his clock going over five minutes. I followed him and he was playing another player at the same time. Is this possible? In any case, there are too many players who don't have the respect for the site or themselves to simply give up. I should know: i've resigned many many times on other sites; i'm an experienced resigner.

This is a community problem, and it's been brought up in numerous posts over the last few months (though it's not a new problem, it's been going on for years). As a behavioral problem rather than a problem inherent in the code, it's difficult for the devs to address. I had been discussing this with Clarkey recently, trying to come up with an idea for how lichess could implement some sort of karma system, where players can award points to those who are generally nice people. But that sort of system would get abused like any other. We also discussed some sort of punishment system for abandoning matches. Since that is actually detectable by the server, I think I rather like that idea. I hope the dev team works to implement something like that.

There are a couple mitigating factors here...
1. You may claim victory against a disconnected opponent (even if that opponent didn't disconnect on purpose).
2. If you can't wait for the "claim victory" button to appear, technically you could seek another game before your first game has finished. (Although if your opponent comes back, technically you'd be playing a simul!)

Fortunately, my opponents don’t disconnect from me but I just paly 3 ou 2 minutes game… In a long game this could be a problem…
I think the idea of a button to “claim win by disconnect” solve the situation… The opponent should hear a ping to force him to move… There is this type of system in playchess.com and works..

Maybe a maximum amount of time per move clock could solve the problem.

I don't really have as much a problem of dis connectors as "sitters" who move quite fast until they see they are losing, then they just sit for five minutes or more until the clock runs out. That's just wasting my time. Also, at this site they have the ability to leave the game sitting and begin another game. I've never seen that happen in another site. Since I'm new here, my experience has been with a lot of anonymous players. Hopefully the problem will be lessened with "name" players who can be identified. Meanwhile, thanks to all for helpful responses.

simple solution: how about not allowing people to play more than one game at a time? thereby forcing them to finish the game or lose points. and i'm sure there's a way to know if they are in a losing position, that way you know it's not a disconnect.

I'm sure galaxie is correct. Not allowing people to start a new game before finishing an old one would work. I'm sure there's a way to keep track of disconnectors too, even if their opponents have to make a note.

People should be able to play more than one game at the same time.

Like Buddy2 said, this has been discussed several times already, and there's no perfect solution.

The best thing so far is that sometimes when someone leaves a game, it appears an option where the other person can claim victory, and that game will figure as abandoned instead of lost on time. But I guess it's impossible to come up with an algorithm that can detect if someone left the game or is just having connection problems.

I also encourage you to insult the person that ran away. I do it, and it feels good.

Beware 'ban-ban' he allows the clock to run down when lost/losing rather than resign!