Currently, if you vote to close a question as off-topic, you're given a choice of a few sites that the question might be suitable for. e.g. on Serverfault, you can choose Superuser, Stackoverflow, Databases, and Unix/Linux If the majority of the close votes also say the question is suitable for one of the other sites, the question is migrated there.
As far as I can see, this semi-automatic migration causes more trouble than it solves, especially now that StackExchange has grown beyond the original SO, SF, SU trilogy. Some of the problems:
- bad questions sometimes get migrated, rather than just closed
- questions sometimes get bad answers before they're migrated
- questions get migrated to the wrong site, e.g. to SF instead of SU Once that happens, they need moderator intervention to be migrated
- there are so many overlaps between sites now that it's not possible to have every reasonable target site in the off-topic dialog, e.g. SF should arguably include Ubuntu and Security as target sites
- people don't always follow their questions to the other site when they're migrated
Proposal
Do away with migrating questions. Instead, when someone chooses "off-topic" as a close reason, there would still be a follow-up dialogue, but it would have the following options:
- off-topic (same as current)
- may be suitable for Other Site #1
- may be suitable for Other Site #2
- may be suitable for _______ (close-voter fills in a site name)
If the question gets 5 close votes and 3 or more are "off-topic," it would be closed with a message saying it's off-topic. If the close votes include suggestions of other sites (either the #1 and #2 that are listed or any other site someone types in), then there'd be a longer note suggesting that the question might be appropriate on the other site, but the asker should look at those sites first before copying and pasting the question.