Migrate to *any* site?

Question

Wouldn't it be a good idea to be able to vote for questions to be moved to any Stack Exchange site? For example, I just voted this question as off topic, but that was all I could do. I wish I could've voted it be moved to Ask Different.

It's OK to have the predefined list of sites that is now when voting to move, but it would be nice to have a more link, where we could pick any Stack Exchange site.

Here's a quick mockup of how I see this implemented:

When the more link is clicked, a list of all the Stack Exchange sites should appear.

Answer 1

Questions can be moved to any SE site but only by moderators.

I think the best thing to do in this scenario is to flag the question for Moderator attention and mark it as "other". Then add a comment in your flag as to where you think it should be migrated to.

Adding even more migration paths to this existing close list would clutter the UI. The idea is to show the most frequent migration paths so the users can migrate most questions.

Moderators should only need to intervene in exceptional circumstances.

Answer 2

This would be extremely problematic for the following reasons:

• Unless you are very familiar with the community that will be receiving the question, you should not be migrating it there. Moderators can get in touch with other moderators on the receiving site when in doubt.

• A question should be of sufficient quality in order to be migrated. I see users who take time to cast their votes and that is fantastic, but very few who edit a question prior to shipping it off.

• Just because a question is on topic for another site doesn't mean it's off topic for Stack Overflow. There are users who know about the sister site and still prefer to ask their question on SO because SO receives the most traffic. Other times, users aren't interested in joining another site and would prefer to receive reputation points on SO.

• Questions not in the given paths to migrate should not be migrated unless there is a compelling reason to do so. The end result of a migration is ensuring that a question gets more high quality answers faster than it would otherwise.

Additionally, I see a lot of:

• Off topic flags indicating Server Fault as the destination where Super User would be a better fit (or vice versa) - The same applies with Webmasters and Programmers.

• April 1 jokes that got taken seriously and almost shipped to a sister site. Can you imagine the mess if one of those got migrated to a math or physics site? This doesn't fall under 'a lot of', but there were several.

• Questions already cross posted on several sites that nearly got 'shuffled'.

I think this ability should be kept in the hands of people who learn from migration mistakes so you don't have to :)

Answer 3

Would like that too. Obviously there are problematic cases. But I think with a bit more rule-o-ritis those can be avoided.

• Make it a requirement for closevoters to have an account with >101 score on the migration site to allow it as target.
• Prevent -1 question from being migrated anywhere. (These seldomly should be moved to the major five either.)

The current flagging system doesn't work. Currently moderators are overrun by requests from badge aspirants. So they mostly engage in menial tasks, rather than deciding on complex edge cases.

Last time I flagged a question to be migrated to Wordpress.SE the moderator in question moved it to Webmasters.SE instead (what I wanted to prevent). Both look too similar, didn't make it ***BOLD*** enough. But it's a clear indicator that the textual communication channel is insufficient.

And precisely for such cases an exact checkbox would make sense. (I would prefer a dropdown select box over a "show more" link however.)

Answer 4

There are good reasons to keep the current migration policy in tact. However, the current user experience for voting off topic is less than ideal. Users clicking "Off-topic -> This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network" do not expect a short list, nor do should they be required to go back one step to "Off-topic -> Other" to type in a site name. The current UI design doesn't adhere to the principle of least surprise.

So I propose that the current reason is kept. However, instead of choosing only from the short list, a list of all applicable sites should be shown, with an option to expand to all sites of the SE network that have come out of Area 51.

The following changes could be performed to do this:

1. The Off topic reason is moved to the top of the Off topic reasoning, removing any static Migration sites so that the menu becomes less cluttered. SO for instance has Super User and Serverfault as first two Off-topic close reasons.
2. A list of most likely migration sites is shown. This list is preferably ordered using the tag values below the question. For instance, if the cryptography tag is present, then https://crypto.stackexhchange.com should be a logical target site. If it is not possible to select target sites from the contents of the question then the list could simply be ordered by frequency. Some sites - such as Superuser and Serverfault as in the previous example - could be pinned down on top of the list.
3. The full list of SE sites can be shown to give full control to the user to choose the right site. Choosing a stupid option will not make any sense since we still require 4 other close votes anyhow. There could also be a button to choose "Other reason" if no site can be found - to get rid of the backtracking.
4. The user is informed about the migration status of the indicated destination for the chosen site before giving the OK. So the question may either be automatically migrated, migrated by moderator intervention or not migrated at all - requiring manual copy / deletion by the user.
5. Finally, the poster of the question should be informed about the status and what is required to migrate the question manually, if that's required.

Manual migration by the original poster should be made easy once the question has been put on hold. It should not require editing the question to copy the content and title, posting on the other site and then deleting the original. Ask the user to migrate or not, possibly copying the profile and opening a new question with the copied content (ask user to alter the tags!).

Most if not all closed questions on crypto have been cross-posted to crypto, sometimes with additional typo's (retyped questions), different users. I do not believe that this is good for the flagging users, the original posters nor the moderators on both sites.

These changes should keep / expand the current functionality while making the migration much more user friendly. Note that I'm not proposing a change in migration policy; this is mainly about enhancing the user experience of the site.

Answer 5

Wouldn't this just overcomplicate the UI for edge-cases where a closure and comment to the author of the question would do?

After all, what's the odds that you'd want to migrate a question from stackoverflow to cooking.se, for example? Of course, now I've said that, there's bound to be a question somewhere on stackoverflow that would be an ideal candidate...