While wandering through Software Engineering Stack Exchange, sometimes a close vote finds its way onto a question from Stack Overflow that was migrated back in '11 and it gets closed.
When this happens:
- The question is locked
- All answers from Stack Overflow are deleted
This, in of itself, isn't a bad thing, but it is locked now. This means that a 10k user cannot vote to delete on it, nor will the automatic deletion scripts act upon it.
The only way to clean up this question (which might not have any answers on it anymore) is to flag it for moderator action. I've got more than a few helpful flags from this... but it really isn't all that much 'fun' bugging the moderators over very routine janitorial duties that 10ks should be able to do themselves... And I'm sure the mods are bored reading the "this is a locked rejected migration"
The request: Allow 10k vote to deletes to be cast upon question that was locked as part of a rejected migration.
If you really want to be nice, allow 20ks to cast vote to undelete on the answers. Sometimes things need to be closed, but some answers need to remain if the question isn't of the type that should get deleted wholesale.
Should the roomba scripts clean these up automatically regardless of other conditions?
No. There is nothing broken with the roomba as to how it handles rejected migrations - there's nothing special about them, other than that they are locked.
There are many possible reasons for a rejected migration. It could be too broad. It could be unclear. It could be a any of the local off topic reasons. Expecting the roomba to delete these questions (positive up vote, has an answer) is incorrect - rejected migrations are closed questions and its as 'simple' as that.
One solution to this would be to make it so the migration isn't locked when its rejected. This would:
- Allow 10k to delete
- Allow people to down vote (and feed the roomba)
- Allow people to edit (and make into a reopenable question)
Whatever the case, when there's a question I'm going to cast a close vote on that happens to be a migration that should get deleted currently the workflow is "notify a mod that I've close voted it so that they can delete it because I can't..." (see question (Software Engineering 10k link))
And if it shouldn't get deleted, its a "wait until it closes, flag it to unlock it and undelete various answers that are actually not bad" (see question and answer)
Note that another solution to the request above is: Don't lock rejected migrations on the target site, which would also solve a number of issues... though it was done for a reason and I'm not completely sure of the business requirements behind that.