Could migration to a site where the original poster is not active influence the involvement in the question?

Question

I encountered this question

correlation of features and target in predicting red wine quality in machine learning

which was migrated from Stack Overflow to stats.stackexchange

I got puzzled about the user not having an account on stats.stackexchange. I did find an account on stackoverflow with that same name. This may not be the same person/account that posted the question on stackoverflow but it does seem to be the case that migrated questions are not necessarily linked with an account.

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• Does such migration change anything for the person that asked the question but does not have an account for the place where the question has been migrated to? (e.g. getting notifications about updates on activity in the question)

  I was wondering whether this type of migration, which creates a ghost account, may in any way influence the involvement of the original poster. Does the OP still get messages and updates about answers to his/her question?

• Should this be changed? (e.g. in order to ensure that people do not lose connection with the questions that they asked, or at least reduce the rate by which this happens)

  Besides the point that such inactive questions, where the person that asked the question is not anymore involved, can be deleted (cleanup of low quality, which may not happen always sufficiently on all sites), one may consider using some ways to get the OP to get better notified about developments with their questions on other sites where they do not have accounts (I am assuming that the connection may be lost after the migration process, but maybe the OP still gets info about the question).

Answer 1

The Stack Overflow account you found is indeed the author's. You can verify this by clicking on the "migrated from stackoverflow.com" link, which takes you to the revision history of the original Stack Overflow question.

When a user's question or answer is migrated to another site, they get a notification that looks like this:

(I took the screenshot from this bug report, which is why HTML entities are broken. I'm not sure if this was fixed or not but I couldn't find another screenshot.)

As for whether a user is notified of activity on the migrated question, an answer from 2011 says yes:

We're not putting notices into the inbox of migration, but if a migrated post gains a new comment (or answer, if it's a question) then a notice will still go into your inbox; with proper links and all that.

In my experience, the author gets notifications about both the migration and any subsequent comments/answers even when they have no account on the destination site. (At least while using the website — the app is missing the notification about the migration itself.)