Ask not on Cix, for they shall answer yes, no, and don't ask in this conf...sad but sometimes true.

On the other hand, I find it usually works. My main excuse for not joining another conf is that I might not get the answer before having to read a lot of posts from a topic that might give me what I want, but might also give a lot of other things, too. I'm often temped to hang around after getting an answer, coz there may be late replies.

One alternative technique, which works well on UseNet, is to ask for replies by email, and then follow it with a summary of all the replies that you get. The drawback here is that the thread that answers your question may a lot more interesting than the email you get, and cixen might not be so comfortable with this old UseNet convention.

On the other hand, anyone who takes the trouble to compile a summary is also contributing the to collected knowledge base of the newsgroup in which the question was asked. It's easy to file away such things for when you might need them. I sometimes wish there was a convention for automating such archiving of summaries, but we can't make everything completely effortless, it seems. That would require too much organisation for most of us, and we tend to be more than a little anarchic. This is one of our great strengths, and also one of our worst weaknesses.