Nobody is certain, but officials at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game figure it's a lot. So many techno-savvy moose hunters went online Monday to get registration permits to hunt moose in Ship Creek, just outside of Anchorage, that they crashed a server at Fish and Game, and all the moose-hunting permits went to the Luddites who showed up to stand in line outside Fish and Game offices in Anchorage and Palmer.

There was a certain justice in the outcome, however, given that the people who stood in line for the 2008 hunt got the shaft.

"Last year, when we offered online registration for this hunt, hunters were allowed to register beginning at midnight,'' area wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott said. " Most of the hunters who stood in line for hours at Anchorage and Palmer ... weren't allowed to register because the online registration (had) issued most of the permits before 8 a.m. That was one technological glitch."

There were others. An overloaded state computer ended up issuing "way more than 100 permits ... which wasn't good biologically,'' Sinnott said, and some hunters who went online were left lost in the computer wilderness anyway.

"The GCI server, sensing a blast of emails from a single source, assumed the recipients were being spammed and stuck the return emails in their spam folders, which most people don't know exist or don't check regularly,'' Sinnott said.

Afterward, there were plenty of hunters unhappy about their inability to obtain permits, which led to meetings at Fish and Game and consultations with the agency's information management staff.

"Now we come to this year,'' Sinnott said. " We insisted that the online registration not start until 8 a.m. to be fair to the people we knew would be waiting outside in line. Our IM guys devised a way to avoid the time lag in assigning permit numbers via emails, and subsequent over-issuing of permits. People registering online received a message saying they would be assigned a permit number while they waited, after which they could hit a key and print the permit. However, the extra load created by this more efficient method crashed the server almost immediately, at which point (we suspect) hundreds of hunters were left staring at a screen for a long time. Some hunters gave up the wait and came down to the Fish and Game office. Some of these made it under the wire and got a permit, others were too late. On the other hand, everyone waiting in line at 8 a.m. got a permit."

Those left staring at blank computer screens -- possibly as many as 1,000 of them -- will have to wait until next year to try again. And Sinnott said he's inclined to ditch the Internet and go back to the old-fashioned way of doing things in 2010.

"This is Sinnott's Corollary to Murphy's Law: Every problem mankind attempts to fix using a new technology creates at least two additional problems,'' he said. "People are worried about a server crashing ... ultimately civilization is going to crash under the increasing load of new technologies.

"Next year we may eschew the new technology and only issue permits in person in Anchorage."

Fish and Game keeps the number of permits for Ship Creek low because the harvest quota is only 10 to 20 bulls in the still-wild valley between the city of Anchorage and the heavily developed suburb of Eagle River. Hunters who obtain registration permits are required to report to Fish and Game immediately if they make a kill, and when the agency sees the number of kills approaching the quota it promptly notifies permit holders that the season is over. Having hundreds of permits in the hands of hunters increases the risks that there will be people in the hunt area and unreachable when the closure notice goes; that could lead to more moose kills than desired.

Contact Craig Medred at craig_alaskadispatch.com.