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I've just come across this question, from the Close Votes section of the new review page. It's over two years old and has two answers, one accepted.

It also has 4 Off-Topic close votes for it to be migrated to Super User. Personally, I'd like to vote to close this as Not Constructive. However, if I do so I'll immediately ship this off to Super User, where I suspect Sathya will hunt me down with the intention of causing me pain :-).

Shouldn't one of the following happen instead?

  1. Automatically close old questions with 4 migration votes without migrating them (not such a good idea; it means that 5 people haven't reviewed the question, which is not so good)
  2. Exclude old questions that might get migrated from the review queues (better but it means close worthy questions might never get closed).
  3. On old questions count a close vote but don't migrate.

The definition of "old" is up in the air :-).

I don't know if the Review links are permanent so here is a permanent link to the question.

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  • The issue here is that you voting to close as non-constructive triggers a migration. (Same issue the other way round)
    – CodesInChaos
    Aug 25, 2012 at 13:46
  • 2
    That question was both too old to migrate and not high enough quality to foist upon another site. Moderator close votes ignore the reason selected by other close voters, so I went ahead and closed it as off-topic. Flagging for moderator attention in these cases is one alternative, but we might not always act quickly enough to catch a question before it's moved.
    – Bill the Lizard
    Aug 25, 2012 at 14:39
  • Now that's an idea...how about just disabling migration after X months or something for non-mods?
    – Ben Brocka
    Oct 3, 2012 at 20:35
  • Precisely... it'd solve problems caused by the new review queues (I think). It seems like it's happening a lot more often now.
    – ben is uǝq backwards
    Oct 3, 2012 at 20:38
  • Hmm ... this question just got closed through the review queue as off-topic after I voted to close as it belongs on TeX. However, it did not get migrated automatically?
    – Steven Jeuris
    Oct 18, 2012 at 14:40

1 Answer 1

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I defined "old" as "60 days". Three things now prevent migrations of questions older than this:

  1. It's not possible to vote for migration on questions older than 60 days.

  2. Close votes specifying a migration target on questions older than 60 days are discarded.

  3. There's an extra check when a question is closed that prevents migration if it is older than 60 days.

Combined, these should greatly reduce the chances of old questions being closed just because someone thinks there's a better site for it, and from being migrated if they are closed.

If an old question is legitimately off-topic and is closed as such, but would be appropriate for another site, raise the issue here on meta - to date, these cases have been fairly rare.

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