Disable migration for questions older than 60 days

Question

This has come up a few times now: migrating old questions causes problems.

The most popular solution to this to date has been to reset votes on migrated posts. This is do-able, but frankly it feels like treating a symptom, and doing so in a way that penalizes folks who answer what are by all appearances valid, on-topic questions.

Migration works best as a way to salvage good but off-topic questions and give them new life on a site where they can thrive. But shuffling old, answered, on-topic questions around for the hell of it is a waste of everyone's time.

Therefore, I think the real solution is much simpler: just disable the migration of old questions. They're rarely welcomed or heavily improved post-migration, often overtly disliked by folks on the destination site, and can end up causing a rather bad experience for folks who were participating in good faith on the original.

I suggest that questions older than 60¹ days should not be eligible for migration, either by normal user close-votes or by moderators. In extreme cases, we can perhaps provide an alternate means of moving old questions, but under normal circumstances these should be done quickly or not at all.

_{¹ 60 days is actually based on a rather unfortunate side-effect of the rep-retention changes introduced this past spring: migrated and then rejected questions older than 60 days cause the authors to suddenly gain (permanent) reputation on the destination.}

Answer 1

I disagree with your assessment of the situation. I think you have a 10000-foot vision of migration that's very different from practice. I don't think this proposal is actively harmful to a large extent, but it is completely useless.

reset votes on migrated posts. This is do-able, but frankly it feels like treating a symptom

Migrating votes with posts is in itself a problem, not a symptom. It's also only loosely correllated with the age of the question, in that older posts have had more time to accrete votes.

penalizes folks

The current system rewards upvoted posts on migrated questions more than non-migrated questions, because they get the votes from the original site on the original site, the votes from the original site on the target site, and the votes from the target site on the target site.

who answer what are by all appearances valid, on-topic questions.

If the question was on-topic it wouldn't be migrated. If your problem is that on-topic questions are migrated, tell off the people who are migrating on-topic questions. If your problem is with questions that were once deemed on-topic but are now no longer considered so (e.g. the kind of SO questions that were once moved to Programmers), that's a different matter that should be juged on a case by case basis.

Migration works best as a way to salvage good but off-topic questions and give them new life on a site where they can thrive. But shuffling old, answered, on-topic questions around for the hell of it is a waste of everyone's time.

If there's good content in an old, off-topic question, I'd rather migrate it to a site that wants it than delete it.

Therefore, I think the real solution is much simpler: just disable the migration of old questions.

That sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Nowhere in your proposal do you mention what problem migration of old questions have (that migration of new questions doesn't have).

They're rarely welcomed or heavily improved post-migration, often overtly disliked by folks on the destination site

If the target site doesn't want the question, the question should not be migrated. That is a problem with the current migration rules. Not the age, but who decides.

and can end up causing a rather bad experience for folks who were participating in good faith on the original.

If they didn't get a bright orange bar multicollider notification, they wouldn't even notice. And how is a migration a worse experience than outright deletion anyway?

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On the flip side, I don't see a major harm caused by this change: old posts that should have been migrated can just be left to die on the source side, as they would be if there was no SE site where they're on-topic. Hopefully the deletion will wait until after someone's reposted the question on the site where it's on-topic and all worthwhile answers have been reproduced as well. Preservationists are going to complain, but as long as you field these complaints, it's your problem. What I'm more concerned about is that it's yet another rule that moderators will have to explain to users when they flag for a migration of old questions.

I see two major problems with migration today: that the target site doesn't get to decide, and that votes are migrated with the posts. Your proposal doesn't solve either problem. If you're so set against migration, remove the feature altogether.

Answer 2

I generally agree with the 60 days rule (particularly given the "unfortunate side-effect of the rep-retention changes", though I think these questions should still be eligible for Moderator migration (mods from the two sites can coordinate with each other to migrate ancient questions if necessary & beneficial, and we can generally trust the mods to do so).

I also think this issue is separate from the issue of resetting votes on migrated posts -- resetting votes is still something that I feel needs to be implemented (and the overwhelming support for it on that question would seem to indicate that I'm not in the minority for once).
The problems with migrating upvotes have been clearly articulated on that question, and in the answers here, so I won't reiterate them - I'll just say that an upvote on Stack Overflow should not directly translate to an upvote on Arqade on migration, and that's what the current system does.

Answer 3

The Problem

Migration doesn't work well because the voting gets screwy. We are left with three not very desirable solutions:

1. Migrate vote totals along with the posts thereby "rewarding" those posts compared to posts native to the destination.
2. Reset vote totals thereby "punishing" good posts.
3. Reset vote totals selectively thereby punishing (no quotes this time) moderators.

As far as I'm concerned, age of the post is pretty irrelevant to the problem of vote totals¹ since posts tend to accumulate votes while the migration is being considered. [Insert hand-wavy argument that shows most votes are cast early in a question's life-cycle anyway.] At any rate, migration in general is fraught with issues. Let's imagine a world in which migration is rare or impossible. I think this is how "migration" would be handled:

1. Off-topic question is asked.
2. Off-topic question is closed (before or after it has been answered).
3. A new (on-topic now) question is asked on the destination site.
4. A link is edited into the closed question to point to the open one.

The order is a bit different, but this is starting to seem like the way duplicate questions are handled within a site. Which leads me to suggest:

Allow Cross-Site Duplicates

Cross-posting² is discouraged and for good reason. Nobody wants to spend their time answering a question only to find it's already been asked and answered elsewhere. Let's take an example of a question that might be answered on several sites to see what I mean:

How should passwords be stored in a database?

Guess what? Stack Overflow is the number one result.³ It's also been asked on Security and Cryptography. Now I don't really know where the question actually belongs, but I certainly would be inclined to trust the folks who frequent the site to "discuss protecting assets from threats and vulnerabilities." There should also be place for people to ask about man -s 3PAM pam or DBA_USERS, of course, but when it comes to the general question it would be nice if the system could point to one, definitive answer somewhere on the network.

We shouldn't migrate all the general password questions to Security. For one thing, almost all of the questions are going to be awful since you can get plenty of decent advice from a Google search. But perhaps more importantly, the big site (Stack Overflow) will disrupt the community of the smaller site (assuming that's the direction migration normally happens). On the other hand, closing those questions down as off-topic isn't exactly the right thing either. Technically it's off-topic for that site, but if there's a site elsewhere on the network that covers the topic, it could very well be answered already. The guy struggling to solve a problem probably doesn't care where their answer comes from. Closing as a duplicate to a question on another site would be ideal since it helps get the asker an answer and it doesn't dump terrible questions on the on-topic site.

Conclusion

Rather than have an arbitrary cutoff for migration restrictions, allow users to close questions as duplicates of questions on other sites. That way, cross-posting can be allowed without duplicating effort (more than we already do). Migrating questions could then be discouraged and rarely used.⁴

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Footnotes:

1. Actually, I don't really have a problem with #1 or #2 since vote total is fairly meaningless anyway. I don't mean voting is meaningless, but rather than it doesn't much matter to me what the highest voted question on a site might be and answers tend to sort themselves out over time. But other people don't see things this way and good, helpful, wanted migrations become a political hot-potato because of having lots of votes.

2. Technically SE only supports multi-posting at the moment. My suggestion is to make something like cross-posting possible, but not actually simultaneously posting the same question on multiple sites. Hopefully, this idea is better than cross-posting.

3. That question has been closed as "Not Constructive" and there are a dozen or more linked questions.

4. For the smaller sites I tend to frequent, I still prefer the idea of resetting votes. But if it's causing excessive pain to the big boys, I think I could make do with more effective cross-posting tools.

Answer 4

My answer may be a little late now, but for what it's worth, this is my opinion…

Posts ≥ 60 days old should still be migrated, if

1. votes for the migrated question are reset to zero

2. all answers and comments are all migrated, all votes (including comment votes) reset to zero

3. reputation is not changed or transferred, so users that posted the question, answers, and comments on the original site get to keep their rep earned. the corresponding users on the destination site keep their rep unchanged too

Essentially with these 3 things it is as if the the OP manually opened a brand new question on the destination site and the answerers and commenters manually answered and commented accordingly.

Basically all I care about is that the content itself gets migrated, not so much the voting and reputation.

I am not a heavy user of the SE sites (except perhaps SO) and I do not have that many moderator privileges, so please go easy if you disagree. I would like to hear some constructive feedback though!

ADDENDUM:

After reading through some other questions, it seems to be a concern that newly-migrated questions don't get the attention they once got when they were first asked, thus reducing the number of possible votes.

Thus I propose treating recently-migrated questions as if they were recently-asked, e.g., putting them on the main page of the destination site.

Answer 5

We ought to be allowed to migrate an old question to our own site's Meta.

Maybe it doesn't happen often (that it wasn't migrated earlier, when it was asked). The arguments against migration (votes etc.) don't apply when it's migration to your own site's Meta.

Answer 6

This is do-able, but frankly it feels like treating a symptom, and doing so in a way that penalizes folks who answer what are by all appearances valid, on-topic questions.

I'd like to propose an alternate solution to this. It seems to me as if the real problem is best summed up as, "all of the sites are disconnected and serve different purposes." Now, I agree that's a problem; however, it only professes of one real solution:

Merge all of the sites together. < < < < < < < < ====

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There. Now that that's out of the way let's discuss some of the benefits of these actions:

• New users only have to go through the painstaking process of signing up with every site. People are normally interested in a multiple topics, why not just have them specify the topics they're interested in rather than sign up for each one?
• Jeff can spend all of the marketing dollars pushing one site and one brand.
• No more wasted brainpower on each site's FAQ and purpose.
• No more wasted beta-site nonsense.
• Area 51 is old now. It's a pretty poor idea anyway -- that goes away. The Area 51 team can do something else like clean Jeff's yacht.
• This would more closely mirror other successful Q/A sites like Yahoo Answers!
• A single Twitter account and Facebook account -- fan base consolidation across social media.
• Good content won't be wasted as users ask questions for which no establish community currently exists. Think organic bottom up growth from day one. Q/A site creation here is such a burdensome process that I often wonder if the idea isn't rooted in the development process of some other Microsoft products.
• Solidarity amongst members: why create divisions between Stack Overflow -- a male dominated community -- and other potentially female dominated professions. Note: we may still want to keep the SharePoint guys on their own server.

This model of one supremely well organized site also works well for others:

• How many Wikipedia(s) serve based on topic differences?
• How many Amazon(s) are there for specific products?
• How many DuckDuckGo(s) are there for different subjects?

Originally, StackOverflow was one good idea. Then it became three-lesser ideas -- a watered down trinity of segregation. Now we're up to 90 sites, many of which aren't good at all and even more dismal is the often overlooked fact that another 464 sites are in the pipeline. One can't help but wonder if this is some George Lucas inspired strategy and the end game is to sell this franchise to Disney too.

We only have one internet. It only needs one Q/A site.