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Many times I see people downvoting questions simply because they have no ability to close a question and the question really belongs on another one of the family of sites. For example, this question on SO. I propose that closing be a two-tiered affair, where a much lower reputation score is required to move the question to one of the other sites than to actually close the question.

The amount of reputation required to move a question to another site should be the same as the amount required to vote a question down. Note that being active on one site (having 100 rep) would automatically give you access to move questions on all sites if your profile is linked. I propose that to eliminate confusion this be a different type of action than close, i.e., a new Migrate "button" would appear when you have 100 rep and the "belongs on..." reasons would be removed from the Close "button".

Related/alternative:

Reset negative vote counts on migrated questions

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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I think I like this idea. I'm not sure about 100 rep - maybe make it 500 so it's in line with re-tagging. Also, I assume this would be a vote-to-move kinda thing?

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    Using 100 ensures that a person who can downvote can also vote to move. Perhaps increasing the amount required to downvote and still keeping them the same would be an acceptable compromise.
    – tvanfosson
    Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 16:48
  • I see moving being much closer to re-tagging...you're just re-tagging with a site, instead of a tag. It's more like meta-taxonomy ;)
    – Andy Mikula
    Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 23:19
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I think lowering the rep required to vote to move a question would end up with a lot of questions that start to bounce back and forth between sites. While there are certainly examples of questions that clearly belong on a different. There are many questions where it's not entirely clear. And sometimes where it's not clear whether it belongs on another site, or there is no site in the SO family where it is appropriate. I believe generally questions are getting filtered out appropriately with the system as is. And opening up this feature to more users I believe would cause more problems than it would solve.

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  • I agree. I think that if 3,000 rep is supposed to be a baseline for someone to "know" what belongs and what doesn't, I don't see why that should be lowered for migrating questions (why would 100 rep qualify someone to necessarily know that it belongs on one of the other sites better?)
    – TheTXI
    Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 16:52
  • Jeff Atwood can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the choice of rep level is more due to the seriousness of the action rather than the knowledge required. IMO moving a question is much less serious than closing it and should be available to more people. Perhaps 100 is too low, but I chose that number since that's the level where people can downvote. A higher number in conjunction with the reset of downvotes might get questions to the appropriate forum more quickly yet not punish questions for being posted in the wrong forum.
    – tvanfosson
    Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 16:57
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I don't think that you should be able to vote to close, before you are able to vote to close. That could get confusing.

I do think that you should be able to flag to migrate, which you can sort-of do already. What you should do currently is flag for moderator attention ( unless you own the question ), and write that it should be moved.

So what I propose is to have another option on the flag button, that basically does the same thing as flagging for moderator attention. If you already have enough rep to vote to close, it should just give you an error suggesting you vote to close instead.

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    If you read closely I am suggesting separating the two actions into a Move and a Close action to avoid just this confusion.
    – tvanfosson
    Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 19:55
  • Then change the title.
    – Brad Gilbert
    Commented Jul 17, 2009 at 20:02
  • @Brad Gilbert - done!
    – tvanfosson
    Commented Jul 18, 2009 at 14:48
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With the addition of superuser.com, this really really needs attention.

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