Etiquette

  • Abusive language is not tolerated on ISS. We ask players to share their skat wisdom with others by PATIENTLY EXPLAINING playing conventions and ways of improving game play, instead of SWEARING, NAME CALLING, or LEAVING GAMES without warning, etc. To that end we encourage players who have been accused of "non-optimal play" to ask for claim justifications and ways of avoiding similar errors in the future. Complaining "know-it-alls" should be able to answer the question what they did in the game to help their partners to make the right decisions. To help with post-mortem analyses, SkatGUI displays the entire trick history and the player hands after each game.
  • The official language on ISS is English. It is common courtesy to switch to a lingua franca when people of different nationalities meet (at ISS tables, say). However, there is nothing wrong with communicating in other languages if all parties feel comfortable.

Cheating

Playing card games on the internet raises cheating concerns, as players can collude using arbitrary communication channels. ISS implements two moderate measures to limit communication within ISS during games: players who are engaged in one or more games are not allowed to talk to other users and players with identical IP or email addresses are flagged in the "IP" column in SkatGUI result table by sharing entries other than ".".

Another concern is "perfect-recall", whereby players take note of the trick history by external means such as pencil and paper or external programs running on the side. While this probably is not in the original spirit of playing card games, it can't be prevented when playing on-line. Players need to decide for themselves whether they want to further their memory skills or to take a shortcut. In any case, memorizing more is correlated with playing cardgames better, regardless how it's done. SkatGUI gives players access to the entire trick history if they wish to use that information when run in "noob" mode.

Privacy

  • All communication with ISS is logged.
  • All played games will be made available for free. Player names will not be anonymized.
  • All games and table conversations can be observed by everyone. Note that this also applies to private tables for which a password is required to play.
  • User email and IP addresses will not be made available to third parties.
  • SkatGUI only sends ISS related information to the server (see Software).