Reading his public email listings, you may get an idea why it is/isn't a good idea to PM him:
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/bulletinbd.htm

Quote: Original post by d000hg
What's the whole "don't PM me" thing about? Is it just because he gets loads of PMs, or because he doesn't check them, or because he really is as grumpy as he appears in his posts?

All of the above.
I have a similar policy. I like helping people but I don't provide private 1 to 1 advice via PM or Email (unless people are willing to pay me). I post here or in other similar public forums because then the answers benefits the community at large.

Most of the people who email/PM want the info in order to make money. My view is that if you want my help to make money you either pay me or you "pay" the community by having the question/answers made public so that the community benefits. In addition time spent answering private messages from people who aren't looking to make money is time not spent answering public ones.

[Edited by - Obscure on August 23, 2007 12:09:55 PM]

I'm wondering if Tom has read this thread yet, and what he thinks about the discussion so far. [grin]

frob wrote:
>I'm wondering... what [Tom] thinks about the discussion so far.

Curiosity noted.

> where did all those 66 FAQs come from

They should be called VFAQs, as in Very Frequently Asked Questions. Just look at the trafic in this forum in the past year alone and count the number of times someone asked "if it was possible to get into the video game industry" or "how to sell a game idea to a big publisher" or "if it was legal to copy someone else's game / artwork".

> he really is as grumpy as he appears in his posts

Simple observation: Tom's grumpiness correlates to the OP's not reading the FAQs. Have you read those FAQs? Have you? Really? Seriously? |8-}

-cb

I've started having a quick look through (not that I am really the target audience) and they seem pretty good - having looked at Tom's resume I can understand he must get a huge number of very similar emails... I still smile when his forum post here is often "read FAQ X" though.