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Pausing a game feature

Just hiding the board as suggested would prevent cheating - I like the idea as I have experienced many of the situations mentioned and I play blitz. Not many people will give you time, so this is possibly the only solution. I would imagine that a mutual agreement to resume would be needed as well to prevent loss of time while the player is still afk
Pausing the game to analyze it is seriously a very uneffective way of cheating in online chess.
Proposed solutions:

(1) To prevent cheating, pausing the game can lead to a blank screen rather than the current position.

(2) Alternatively, it can be made that the person who requests "pause" and all kibitzers be only able to see a blank screen rather than the current position in the game. The only person who can see the current position is the opponent who accepted the pause request. I am not sure if this is technically challenging to implement.

(3) Like "take backs", users can disable "pauses", and thereby the people who want to argue against it can be made happy.

Finally, I believe that although constructive arguments are the best way to do these decisions, in cases where both sides have very compelling arguments, a username-based (not IP-based) poll on lichess.org, can help resolve such issues democratically.

Best wishes.
Of the points thus far, cafestream's point (3) is most important. Other chess servers do not have a way to disable pause requests, and I would find a pause request (among other requests) distracting.

(1) and (2) aren't good enough because cheaters can always find a workaround. If you're really concerned about the time aspect, how about this?--what if "pause" increased the time of the player NOT on move? Both players would agree to it, and "unpause" could occur after a half-move by each player (or by mutual agreement, I suppose).
"username-based (not ip-based poll)" ...lol someone is up to no good

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