[captncraig]

Unfortunately it's much more common for a player to leave from a losing position without resigning. It's hard to solve that problem without hurting commuters in the crossfire. I also play on the subway, but I stick to correspondence or classical depending on where I am. I usually have 10-15 correspondence games open, and long format is an amazing way to improve your game without worrying about time sensitive connection issues.

[mlthoughts2018]

Given that the lockout policy only applies on actual accounts (someone signed up a username), I don’t see why it would be hard. If an account disconnects intermittently, the history of that would be obvious compared with someone who is disconnecting all the time because they are frustrated at losing. My whole comment is just that it doesn’t seem like lichess is even trying to differentiate at all, and failing that, they don’t respond or unlock accounts if you write to them about it either. There is so much super low-hanging fruit they could do to make the policy better, but just don’t.

Separately from this, I personally actually think it’s totally backwards and unreasonable to ever, for any reason, care that an opponent disconnects. I don’t care at all if my opponent disconnects for any reason, whether because they are frustrated, their cell connection dropped, whatever. They have zero obligation to move fast, resign from losing positions, or anything else. It is internet chess with literally nothing riding on it, ever, for anyone.

If you click to play a game of length X minutes or whatever, that’s your commitment. It’s not your opponent’s. They might waste X-1 minutes looking at cat pictures before playing a move— that’s well within their rights and you agreed to play, meaning you can quit or disconnect if you don’t wanna wait around for the next move, or you can cede that your opponent can do whatever they want with their allocated clock time, whether that is resigning, disconnecting, or playing nonsense moves, or playing for real.

I think all the frustration that an opponent can degrade your experience by using their clock time to do whatever they want is unreasonable. That’s on you, not on the system or the opponent.

[MauranKilom]

Especially in longer time controls, it is plain rude to "resign" from a losing position by timing out instead of resigning. I get that this does not apply to your case, but it's unusual to try and find that mate in 10 by disconnecting.