Disallow draw offers during opponent turn

[ddugovic]

The spirit of the FIDE Laws of Chess is that you play your move, offer the draw, press the clock. If a player offers a draw during opponent's turn, he should gaet a warning by the referee, but he cannot retract his illegal draw offer.
As playing the move and pressing the clock is one and the same event online, the correct online draw offer should be: offer a draw, play the move. Lichess should not allow draw offers of a player not having the turn, as it is an illegal draw offer. In the same spirit lichess does not allow illegal moves. A draw offer during opponent's turn is abused to distract the opponent with the popup, which costs him a few seconds time and breaks his concentration.

https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/the-draw-offer-is-legal-in-the-own-turn-only

[rMazeiks]

It is possible to enforce the FIDE Laws just as you describe them, but in fact it would require the opposite changes:

• A draw can only be offered during the opponent's turn
• When a draw is offered, the clock of the offering player keeps ticking as if no move was made, and the opponent's clock resets&freezes to the previous value
• When the draw is declined or cancelled, the clock finally swaps

This way, FIDE rules are followed as:

• Draws can only be offered after a move is made
• Draw offers take the time of the player offering the draw

In addition,

• Draw offers will not unfairly take the time of the opponent, and distract them
• Players will be consider offering draws more carefully

[niklasf]

I think this is a good opportunity to try the "Convert to discussion" feature.

Personally, I think the rule makes much less sense online than offline, so I think we shouldn't do anything besides the existing rate limiting.

[ijhchess]

I agree that this doesn't make much sense online. When spectating bullet, I've noticed people like to offer a draw while their clock isn't running to avoid losing too much time.

[rMazeiks]

I think the law is about respecting your opponent's time, and not distracting them with a draw offer during their turn. This should apply equally online and offline.

[ddugovic]

Yeah, I can't imagine this issue moving anywhere without discussion (although I'm not advocating discussion either since the status quo seems challenging to improve upon).

On the feedback forum I suggested removing the draw offer button because:

• Most draws are resolved under 3-fold repetition, 50-move rule, stalemate, bare kings, etc. anyway
• Many players are using it "wrong" by offering draws on their opponent's time; on their own time they are lucky to remember to click the draw button twice to offer the draw
• Most of the time players offer draws, they do so because they cannot figure out how to use the resign button either
• Agreed draws are even rarer than offered draws since (especially in time pressure) it is not possible to re-offer a draw for many moves after an offer is accidentally missed
• There are many forum posts about draw etiquette and no action has been taken so far

[zieren]

I like rMazeik's suggestion. Wouldn't the following work?

1. Extend the server API to accept a draw offer together with a move. I assume it doesn't do that today.
2. When clicking "offer draw", show a text "draw will be offerend with your next move" and set a flag. Don't send a request yet.
3. When making the move, copy that flag into the move sent to the server.

The server side change could be to handle this like two consecutive requests, first for a draw offer and then for a move. Caveat: I'm not familiar with the code at all.

I think this is a useful feature. I've actually had opponents spamming me with draw offers while I was thinking. The spirit of the FIDE rule is to avoid that, and I don't see why interruptions are any different between OTB and online.

Removing the draw button seems like a drastic measure. If a basic feature is confusing to use today, why not improve it? Maybe in this context buttons labeled with plain text are easier to use than buttons labeled with icons. If people confuse the "resign" and "offer draw" buttons, I assume it's because the icons aren't intuitive.

Some research.