robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (09/17/84)
References: We have all seen (particularly in net.games.rogue) questions that have been asked many times, to which many people know the answers. I imagine that some of the people asking these questions get swamped with mail. Sometimes the net gets swamped with responses as well. It's not easy to know when you are asking one of these "general knowledge" questions, but when you suspect you are, here's how to minimize the number of answers you get: What does the message "shove off, buster" mean in version 4.1 of the game Cradleboats?" If you are interested in sending me the answer, please do it only if you select a random number from one to twenty, and the number you pick is a seven. This example will produce approximately 1/20th of the answers you would get otherwise. (For the curious, there is no such game as Cradleboats. I was going to use one of the typical Rogue questions in my example, but it occurred to me that if I did I might get many messages answering the question.) - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison or: decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison or (emergency): princeton!eosp1!robison