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As we know, it's not possible to flag upvoted posts as "very low quality", or vote-to-close as "belongs on another site" if the question is too old, but the system doesn't actually tell us that.

If we have already voted to close a question, we see that in the close dialog. Even "already raised this flag" is a nice red warning.

It can become very confusing to figure out what exactly is going on when an option is suddenly just missing - Why can't I use it? What do you expect me to do? I know that this is supposed to be migrated, why can't I migrate it?

Of course an active meta user can find that and figure it out, or ask about it - but the system really could do with some sort of feedback for this kind of thing. My proposal, therefore, is as follows: Disable the option, but leave a simple explanation string as to why it's disabled. Personally, I'd prefer something along the lines of the "already raised that flag" warning.

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  • Where does this site behavior happen specifically? – Aza Mar 29 '14 at 6:10
  • @Emracool Try to flag this question as very low quality. As it is upvoted, the option will not show up. Now try to close any question that is older than 60 days as a migration (on a site where migration paths exist) - the option will not show up. For comparison, any new question on SO could be migrated away and correctly shows the option. This applies to both the flag dialog and the close dialog (and if I'm not mistaken also for more options than just VLQ and migrate). – user98085 Mar 29 '14 at 6:14
  • Gotcha. Makes sense! – Aza Mar 29 '14 at 6:15
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    The close dialog used to tell us (at least it did for mods, not sure about others) that the question was too old to migrate next to the main off-topic reason. Don't know why that was removed. – animuson♦ Mar 29 '14 at 13:55
  • I confirm that it used to say "off-topic (too old to migrate)" for everyone. – michaelb958--Reinstate Monica Mar 29 '14 at 14:06

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