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Moderators have access to some more options for migrating questions. There are some small aspects to that that could be improved:

Moderators can currently remigrate a question.

This makes no sense at all, there is no reason to ever remigrate a question because remigration is not properly supported and it tends to break in all kinds of ways if you actually do it. It should not be possible to remigrate a question, even for moderators.

Moderators can migrate to every child meta.

If we type the site name, we'll always get two options: the actual site and the per-site meta. This sometimes leads to the moderators migrating to the meta site accidentally. But there is no reason to ever migrate to a foreign per-site meta, the only useful meta targets are the site's own per-site meta and the main Meta Stack Exchange. So I suggest to remove the foreign per-site metas from the list of migration targets.

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    Not allowing remigration sounds like a separate issue, as normal users can also do that with 4 close votes to the same place (I assume you're talking about migrating a migrated question).
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:44
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    I am not sure about your second point. On several occasions we've had people posting questions about general SE voting / tagging etc on our own site Meta when really they would belong on MSO so would migrate those over.
    – JonW
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:45
  • @animuson From what I've heard, non-mods can't do that anymore. But my information might be wrong
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:45
  • @JonW MSO is the exception in my proposal, this should be always possible. But there is no reason to migrate from Skeptics.meta to Cooking.meta, ever.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:45
  • @MadScientist Ah yes, I misread the rest of the question there. Carry on!
    – JonW
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:48
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    @JonW: (a) MSO is the exception, as mentioned. (b) It's actually OK to keep network-wide featurreqs/bug reports on your child meta. But migrating to MSO is fine, too.
    – Manishearth
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:50
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    @animuson - remigration is not possible for regular users.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 12:52
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    > there is no reason to ever remigrate a question – There are plenty of reasons to re-migrate a question. We sometimes get stuff from Stack Overflow that is just off topic for Super User but absolutely on topic for Ask Different or Android. Not saying that questions should be re-migrated—the team has mentioned we shouldn't do this anyway.
    – slhck
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 13:21
  • @slhck In such a case the migration should be rejected and then migrated from the original source. Remigrating breaks stuff and a serial migration is a very bad user experience for the asker. Remigration is just not supported properly by the software.
    – Mad Scientist
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 13:25
  • I know it should be rejected and migrated from the original source. I just disagreed with the statement that there wouldn't be any reason to do this. In fact it seems more logical to just re-migrate it instead of rejecting it and then flagging it on the original site (or whatever). And last time I saw it, it worked without problems. But yeah, if it shouldn't be done, then the option should be removed.
    – slhck
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 13:27
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    @JonW I'm not advocating for removing the migration path to MSO, but you shouldn't have to use it in 99.9% of cases. You do not need to migrate general SE questions about how works to MSO. If nothing else, most of them have been asked here to death. Your community, on the other hand, doesn't need to know or care about MSO, so answering those questions on your meta (with a link to MSO for additional context if needed) would be more helpful in the long run.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 13:55
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    @slhck The parts that break are the parts you can't easily see. Most notably, the automatic redirect from source to the destination - which is crucial, if you want the asker to follow the question along to its new home and be able to edit/comment/accept an answer, etc. Migration isn't too gentle on new users to begin with. Throw multiple sites into the mix and it's a total mess.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 13:57
  • @AnnaLear: It's usually Usability issues with StackExchange platform. Can't recall any off-hand but it's the sort of post you'd only really get on UX.SE anyway so they are unlikely to have been mentioned on MSO already (and I'd check before migrating anyway).
    – JonW
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 14:00
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    There is one site where migration to foreign child metas make sense - MSO itself.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Commented Jun 10, 2013 at 14:58
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    status-declined and status-completed?
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jul 10, 2013 at 20:35

2 Answers 2

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Once the close changes and the accompanying flag system refactoring are deployed network-wide, we'll implement the first part of this request - disabling remigration for moderators.

We will not be implementing the second part because we feel it's a restriction that doesn't bring much benefit. I say this as someone who has made the mistake of migrating to a meta instead of a main site once. It's fairly easy to fix by clearing migration history on the source site, migrating to the correct location, and then flagging the wrongly migrated question for moderators on the destination site to clean up.

Update: moderators can no longer remigrate a question.

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I would argue that the sorting order / filter / UI for site names displayed as migration targets is broken. Meta could be an additional check box or a separate radio button below main sites or at least sorted below the main site.search path list ordering detail

The data I have is limited to my site, but we migrate questions away from the main site 10 times as often as away from the meta (153 to 11). Our main site has yet to migrate a single question to any other meta site. Of the 153 outbound migrations, 79 go to SO, 33 to SU, 12 to our Meta and 8 each to SF/Programming. Another 9 sites share 13 total migrations.

  • Our main site sends things to SO 50% of the time and not once to MSO.

  • For us, the main site should always sort the meta site below the main site or suppress them entirely. If you wanted to keep the doors open to a main -> other meta migration, make it a check box or secondary radio control to send to belongs on another site's meta in the Stack exchange network.

  • Our meta sends thing to the main site 2/3 of the time and to MSO the remaining 1/3.

  • For us, meta should only redirect to the main site and MSO.

If you can't optimize both sorting on usage patterns when text search is performed, I'd say sort the meta below the main site in all cases and you'd have a better migration tool.

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    What a giant screenshot. Do you have like a 90-inch monitor?
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 17:49
  • @CodyGray It's a 13 inch retina MacBook. It has a lot of pixels so I made it as small as I could. There have been several posts to change the upload process to handle retina uploads from iOS and OS X - but it's not had enough traction to get implemented (or is too challenging to implement without imgur's help). See meta.stackexchange.com/questions/161111/…
    – bmike
    Commented Apr 2, 2013 at 18:05
  • Ah. Couldn't you post the original image, and then add an m to the end of the imgur URL? That instructs imgur to display a "medium" version of the image, which would be about half the size of the original. Guess I could post that as an answer to the question you linked, but I can't test whether or not it would work properly for Retina displays since I don't have one. :-(
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Apr 3, 2013 at 3:01
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    FYI, the metas-before-mains bug has been fixed.
    – Kevin
    Commented Jul 10, 2013 at 20:41

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