Remove all migration targets except Meta Stack Overflow

Question

Due to the apparent increase in the number of bad migrations from Stack Overflow (based on comments in chat, other child metas etc.) I think it's time to remove the option altogether.

In recent months Programmers and Server Fault have been removed and there appear to be an increasing number of bad migrations to Super User (I don't have access to the figures to verify this though).

It's becoming clear that with over 13,000 users that can vote to close we cannot rely on the ones with knowledge of the other sites being around when the question is being voted on. This results in subsequent closers following the herd and voting the same way. Even with 4 votes being required to migrate off SO it goes wrong far to often.

It also seems like people use migration to mean:

I don't want this question here, but I don't want to feel bad about closing it as off topic.

Even if the migration is correct, well meaning comments along the lines of "This should be asked on X" lead to effective cross posting and the creation of duplicates should the question actually be migrated.

With the ever increasing number of sites users often don't have accounts on the site where the question is migrated to leading to orphaned questions and potential work for moderators and the team get the question associated with the correct user again.

Given all this I think we should just remove the option.

If the poster wants the migration they can flag the question for moderator attention.

The only drawback I can see is that it will result in more flags from people who want the question migrated. If there is no migration option then people would have to use the "Other" option and type in the site they think the question should be migrated to. This might deter some people and I'm sure something could be done to make these flags less prominent in the moderator queue.

NOTE: I'm specifically thinking of Stack Overflow here, but there's probably an argument for removing the options from the other sites too. Particularly before they get so large that the same problems start appearing there.

Answer 1

You may like to know there is at least one site that gets good migrations from Stack Overflow. I'm a moderator on dba.se and imo we benefit a lot from the constant flow of migrations, rejecting only a tiny fraction.

I'm not sure why we are different, but I think it is because folk on SO understand what is on-topic for dba.se without having to guess: if it is about databases and off-topic on SO, then it is very likely on-topic for us. I think it may be a bit harder to judge what exactly is on-topic on SU, SF or programmers.se for the average 3k+ user on SO.

As well as benefiting from the incoming questions, migrations also raise awareness of our site, which doesn't have the visibility of the trilogy or programmers.se: we get a stream of new users following their questions over.

I hope that we at least are able to remain as a migration target for SO. Perhaps the bar should somehow be raised or lowered for migrations based on the reject rate for the target site? At any rate, the current system is helping us a lot!

Answer 2

If we're going to do this, I'd like to change the following part of the request:

If the poster wants the migration they can flag the question for moderator attention.

This has all the same drawbacks of community migration, plus the added drawback of many more flags for Stack Overflow moderators to handle. (We had around 2000 migrations in the last 90 days, for reference, but not all of those would be flagged if the option were removed. That would probably only be an extra 10-20 flags a day, but we've already proven that moderators are no better at migrating than everyone else.)

I'd rather the questions were simply closed, and the OPs encouraged to go search on the proposed target site to see if their questions have already been asked. If not, they can repost them manually. (If they already posted an off-topic question on SO, they should probably be encouraged to read the FAQ on the proposed new site as well.)

Answer 3

I think Jack Douglas has posted an extremely effective argument against removing migration paths completely. It is also an effective argument against enforcing a certain level of privileges on the target site as dasblinkenlight suggests.

With 306 questions migrated to DBA.se in the last 90 days but only 43 users on DBA.se with close privileges. It's highly unlikely that even one of these users was partially responsible for each migration. Enforcing that all 5 close votes have the same privilege on the target site would effectively stop all migration to DBA.se. I obviously don't have definitive data on this but what are the chances that 5 of 43 users have voted to close more than 2 of these questions on SO; especially when some don't have a SO account?¹

Either of these two suggestions could be seriously detrimental to the smaller sites in the network.

So that this argument doesn't continue raising it's head why not let the moderators and community of each site decide for themselves? It might work something like this.

• Each site's moderators jointly, or through a meta question (and so the community), decide which sites they want their site to be a migration target for. The arguments for and against are kept to each sites meta.
• They can change this at any time based on migration failure rates; whatever the current "perception" is; falling numbers of new users due to lack of migrations or whatever reason they can dream up.
• The migration list on each site becomes that site's meta plus the top 4 sites who want to be a migration target (I'm not certain how you would determine "top" but by size/number of successful migrations for example; this list would be dynamically updated and so the target sites could change according to the success of the migrations to those sites).

As a possible extra you could stop moderators from having the ability to migrate to sites that did not want to be a target but they could still migrate to sites that do. This would enable the number of successful migrations to be the sole arbiter as to what sites appear in the migration list.

tl;dr

Rather than messing with a system that can really help the smaller sites in the network let each site decide for themselves who they want to be able to migrate to them.

_{1. The question is rhetorical but if anyone has any actual numbers that'd be good.}

Answer 4

I think that a better alternative would be to present only the sites in which the user has earned a privilege of casting close and reopen votes as potential migration targets. The rationale is that if a user has sufficient privilege to participate in closing questions on the target side, then he or she is presumed to have enough understanding of what is appropriate on that site, and could be trusted with providing good migration suggestions.