From the group description:

LGBT Club wrote:

We are an inclusive group extending the same warm welcome to all who fit into longer acronyms (LGBTQIA+ etc) and supportive allies too.

We do not police identities.

If someone says they are a given orientation, gender, etc, we simply believe them. Not only is this just a good policy in life, but also, we couldn't check if we tried. There's no gay test that we can do at the door, and when it comes to gender, trans people exist and that's the T.

So, we simply accept what people tell us about themselves. Unless they have a self-contradictory combination of things, say for example "Hi, I'm an aroace pansexual and..." in which case they probably misunderstood some term but it's not the end of the world. They can figure it out in their own time. But the point is, we don't police people's identities.

Nor are people required to tell us about their identities.

Sometimes it happens that someone tells us about their identity, and there are things that may raise an eyebrow, for example when someone's profile picture, group memberships, and behaviours make them look like a catfish, simply here to solicit sexuaI exchanges with members (which, while again not something we can or should try to police when it comes to your private DMs, isn't what the club is for).

In such cases, where catfishing seems a likely possibility, we may be suspicious, "keep an eye on" them, etc, but we won't tend to act unless they cross certain lines.

While Chess.com is not a dating site, relationships can develop organically here as anywhere else (indeed, I have met people here that way), but just some advices to keep yourself safe meanwhile:

1) Be wary in general, and do not share anything that could be a problem for you if the other person turns out to be malicious

2) If someone's visible friends list is entirely conventionally attractive women, that is probably a red flag

3) Profile pictures can be run through a reverse image search (bear in mind they may be cropped or flipped to try to avoid this) to see if the pictures were stolen

4) If you want to be sure that someone is the person in their profile picture, you can ask for a digital salute, that is to say, a photo of them holding a piece of paper with the URL of their profile on it. Don't ask for just their name, or hello [your name] etc, because if a catfish is also catfishing the person whose photos they stole, they can probably trick them into doing such for them (oh, will you say hi to my friend Nastja like this?) but a URL would prompt the other catfished person to look it up and realise they are being catfished.

Here's an example of what a salute can look like:

Note also that doing a salute this way (rather than just a sign saying "Hi, I really am Nastja!" or something) not only is safer for the person receiving the salute (because of the reason I gave above) but is also safer for the person giving the salute (because nobody can use my above photo to catfish someone else—it'd just lead whoever sees it to my actual real profile here).

Now, nobody owes you photos and nobody is obliged to do the above, but if someone claims their profile picture is them but is unwilling to do such a thing to prove it, you may at least have cause to be sceptical and thus extra cautious about sharing anything personal that could cause problems for you if used against you. If somebody says they can't do it right now, that's fair enough, we're all often busy and/or on-the-go; just tell them you'll wait for them to do it later (and then really do hold out for that before trusting them with anything).

Nobody is obliged to even show their face.

Based on profile pictures, the admin team here is, at time of writing: myself, a 23rd century starship captain, a cat at a chessboard, a chess position, and some shallow water. That's all fine. But it's not ok to use someone else's image and pretend to be them.

It can be argued sometimes that "I wasn't pretending to be this person, it's just a picture I liked / how I wanted to be represented" and that's fine when it's (like Captain Pike) a TV/film personality, or a cartoon or such, but it's not fine when you could easily be taken for that person, and/or you just ripped somebody's social media photos to use.

If you do want to show a face, but not your face (because you're camera-shy, private, dysphoric, whatever) then I recommend using Picrew or similar to create a cartoon avatar to represent you; that way, it can look as much or as little like your physical self as you like.

tl;dr:

We don't police identity and will only investigate/challenge if we have to for safety reasons.
Beware that not everyone on the Internet will be who or how they say they are
As a matter of policy: you can be as private as you like and represent yourself how you like, but if you use someone else's image and pretend it is your own, that's not ok and you may be challenged on such.

LGBT Club

Super Admins

Admins