Please stop using SoftwareEngineering.SE as your toilet bowl [closed]

Question

Stack Overflow users have been using the "off topic - belongs on SoftwareEngineering.SE" close reason as an alternative to all the other close reasons. It'd be helpful if people actually read the FAQ and the six guidelines for subjective questions before voting to migrate questions like:

• What's your favorite code review tool?, no redeeming value to favorite lists that become argumentative
• Is 4-5 years the “Midlife Crisis” for a programming career?, "help my exact situation" questions are too localized
• Nuggets of wisdom?, fails 5 out of the 6 guidelines
• As a programmer what single discovery has given you the greatest boost in productivity?, fails 4 out of 6
• Programmer's Wages, too localized and too vague
• How do I write code that doesn't suck?, too broad

Absent a reversal of the Stack Overflow community from viewing SoftwareEngineering.SE as the Stack Overflow cesspool, can the "off topic - belongs on SoftwareEngineering.SE" close reason be removed in favor of manual migration by moderators who can actually spend the 10 seconds to determine if the question should be closed outright first?

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To say that SoftwareEngineering.SE is such a nebulous place and nobody knows what its scope is as the reason why crappy questions keep getting migrated there is to miss the point. Good questions are good questions on all of the sites, and questions that are too vague, that are too argumentative, too localized, and too broad are universal close reasons. There is no special dispensation for SoftwareEngineering.SE to have bad questions, even if you personally think the questions on there suck.

Even the six subjective guidelines for subjective questions are universal guidelines: they affect all sites. So even if you had no idea what the consequences of using the "off topic - belongs on SoftwareEngineering.SE" close reason were, there are still all of the other close reasons for which bad questions, like the ones above, can be closed.

Answer 1

Questions like the various strains of "How much should I be making?" are off topic on any Stack Exchange site, because they are too localized anywhere. It will be out of date within a year. Please kill such questions; don't give them to someone else to kill them for you.

Also, don't use a new feature just beacuse it is there. (Hint, the new migration path) Our site would welcome constructive questions that get asked on SO because the user did not know about P.SE. However, we do close off-topic questions quite aggresively, so migrating bad questions will not keep them open much longer anyway. Please do us all a favor and don't pass the buck, just because you can with the new path.

As a P.SE user, I don't like seeing our site getting dumped useless questions. I hope the migrators will try to have the same respect for P.SE's scope -and any other new site that may come along in the future - as they do for SOs.

Answer 2

I'll say it again: lead by example. When the migrated questions fit with questions already open/popular on the site, you just sound hypocritical criticizing SO users for not reading the FAQ - your own users aren't doing so either!

• What's your favorite code review tool?: plenty of "favorite tool" GTKY questions still open, with at least two questions looking for code review tool recommendations.

• Is 4-5 years the “Midlife Crisis” for a programming career?: plenty of career questions / "what should I think of my specific situation" questions already there.

• Nuggets of wisdom?: closed as a duplicate - 'nuff said.

• As a programmer what single discovery has given you the greatest boost in productivity?: poll/gtky question, of which there are plenty.

• CodeGolf: Find the Unique Paths: this was in the FAQ, so I'm not sure why you even brought it up here. Let's just pretend you didn't...

• Programmer's Wages: I found a couple of similar questions, one closed, one not.

• How do I write code that doesn't suck?: This is actually four specific questions under one broad heading - someone could have suggested that the author split it up... But I can certainly understand why it would have been migrated.

Something else to keep in mind... A question can be on-topic and still be a lousy question. Maybe you can fix that with editing (as tvanfosson suggests), or maybe you just have to close it and move on, but at least the author knows where to ask the next one. The alternative - expecting SO users to both judge what's on-topic for your site and filter out the on-topic trash - means an extra bit of frustration for users who take the time to improve their initial offerings only to find them still closed on the site where they asked them... and then faced with an entirely different set of suggestions for improvement on P.SE. That just makes more work for everyone.

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Regarding your edit: if we could agree on which questions were "universally bad", then two of your examples wouldn't have had their long and storied careers on SO. I'm getting a little bit irritated hearing you preach about how easy it is to get folks to understand and agree on what's "universally bad", especially when some of the questions you're dismissing predate your involvement with both sites. If it was that easy, we'd have dealt with them years ago, and P.SE wouldn't even exist.

Summary

• Bad questions should be closed, not migrated. But,
• Bad questions will be migrated anyway, because "bad" is subjective / some folks disagree with the criteria / destination site is already full of bad / etc.
• The solution is defense in depth: bad questions that slip through the cracks on SO and get migrated can still be closed and/or deleted on the destination site.

Answer 3

Get over it. Nearly all of these questions are better suited to finding a life on programmers.se than on SO. Just because they fail to flourish there doesn't mean that it was wrong to migrate them. I'd suggest that rather than close the questions, you might want to take time to edit them to improve them. Given that they've been migrated, you may want to take a little more freedom to put them into a shape that makes them a better question for that forum.

For what it's worth, removing "favorite" and concentrating on enumerating the features that lead to the selection of a code review tool would be a very good subjective question. Career discussions, I think, are (or should be) a valid subject on programmers.se. Reframing the "single discovery" question to elicit more in depth answers would turn it into a very useful resource -- though the question is old enough that it might not help. Code Golf, like it or not, is explicitly mentioned in the FAQ, and I think "how do I write code that doesn't suck" while overly broad has some subquestions and could be edited into a shape that would make it very useful for new programmers finding it through Google.

Answer 4

Just a datapoint: it's not only SO, and it's not only Programmers SE.

Example: this question by this user. Here it is in its entirety:

Search data in iphone?

i have search the data the result is 838 record is found, my data is in 800th record.In each time i navigate the data and then i seen my data.So what is the best method having the iphone to see my 800th record?Please help me.

It started off at SO, where it was migrated to SU. SU migrated it to Apple SE. I closed it as NARQ: "It's difficult to tell what is being asked here."

I'm guessing (based on it having started on SO, his other questions, and the mention of his data) that it's a programming question—but migrating it certainly didn't make it any easier to tell what was going on. The mods at SO and SU should have noticed prior to migrating it that the destination site wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it either.

But most importantly: my understanding is that—after two migrations—the user who asked it won't be able to find out where it went or why.

Why was it migrated even once?

Answer 5

Is there a good reason for not requiring moderators from the destination site to 'accept' migrated questions from another site? This shouldn't replace the need of source site moderators to carefully consider whether the question is being sent to the right place.

I don't know if the volume of migrated questions would overwhelm destination site moderators. I doubt that the time it would take to accept/decline the question is more than the hassle of closing unwanted questions.

Answer 6

The reasoning that SO users should be more diligent in applying the rules of P.SE prior to considering migration is somewhat contrary to the Law of Demeter, which seems to me to be just as applicable here as it is for OOP design.

Firstly, there are nearly 4,000 users on SO capable of closing/migrating questions, and there are probably a significant number of them that don't routinely follow Meta discussions, blog posts, etc. where the intricacies of the P.SE rules are laid out. Many might only give the P.SE FAQ a cursory glance to get the general gist of what the site is about. It may therefore be unrealistic to expect more diligence from these SO users regarding making judgments about questions prior to migration.

This is further complicated by the fact that the content on P.SE is quite broadly defined, and there is the additional caveat of "The 6 laws", for which there could be a great deal of debate/disagreement over how many a given question satisfies. When you add in the fact that the P.SE community itself doesn't often follow their own rules, sometimes blatantly reproducing some of the more controversial purely-for-fun SO questions, it becomes even more unlikely that SO (and specifically non-P.SE) users can best gauge what is most appropriate for P.SE.

Tying this back to my initial mention of the Law of Demeter, each community should be primarily concerned with judging what is on- or off-topic for its own community, with only a general concern about what is appropriate for another. In other words, SO users are best at judging SO-appropriate content, while P.SE users are best at judging P.SE-appropriate content. Expecting SO users to do both is unreasonable given the nature of P.SE.

I think that for quite a few of the examples you give it is reasonable for an SO user to believe they may have a place on P.SE, and passing the baton to them to make the final expert judgment seems very reasonable. Every community has to perform its own quality control, and SO has such a large volume of cruft to sift through that it seems a small thing to ask that P.SE makes the final call on a few of the subjective edge cases.

Answer 7

I realize that I'm coming into this discussion late but wanted to point out that on PSE we are closing slightly more than half of all questions migrated from SO. That doesn't seem like a good ratio and probably points to the fact that the current system (or lack of system) isn't really working.

Is this discussion going to net out anywhere?

Answer 8

To be fair, when I submitted the idea to Area 51, it was meant to hold all the subjective questions that weren't suitable to Stack Overflow. It has undergone significant change since then, and so confusion is natural.

Keep working on rejecting bad questions, and keep working on helping Stack Overflow moderators choose correctly. It's a new site, and it'll take several months for it to figure out what it's going to be and what it isn't - just the same way Stack Overflow had to figure itself out.

Don't get too impatient, and please don't lay this at the feet of the moderators - the community will eventually 'get it'.

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• can the "off topic - belongs on Programmers.SE" close reason be removed in favor of manual migration by moderators who can actually spend the 10 seconds to determine if the question should be closed outright first?

No. Fully 1/3 of the questions that I just sampled (that were reasonable questions that do follow the FAQ) come from Stack Overflow. There are a lot of questions that are submitted to Stack Overflow which aren't appropriate for Stack Overflow, but are appropriate for Programmers.SE.

It's a natural migration path, no more or less useful than the migration paths to Server Fault, Super User, etc.

Forcing the moderators to manage this workload is not reasonable due to the amount of work that would entail.

• So even if you had no idea what the consequences of using the "off topic - belongs on Programmers.SE" close reason were, there are still all of the other close reasons for which bad questions, like the ones above, can be closed.

Unfortunately people don't like to close questions, so on top of the misunderstanding about what Programmers.SE is meant to be, some people will attempt to migrate it anyway, hoping that it might find a home there.

Sometimes they are right.

Now, I don't have access to the stats on Programmers.SE, but I'd appreciate it if you would give us the scope of the problem:

• How many bad questions are migrated per day?
• How much of the total number of questions submitted consist of badly migrated questions (i.e., total volume vs. badly migrated)?
• How many good questions are migrated per day?
• How do those compare to bad vs. good questions submitted directly to the site?
• Are the moderators on Programmers.SE having difficulty keeping up with the inflow of bad questions?

If the above problem is truly causing Programmers.SE to fail or presenting a severe load on moderating, then perhaps we should look into resolving the problem.

But your arguments lack compelling evidence that something needs to be done. Yes, it's annoying, and yes, it's going to take time for the moderators on Stack Overflow to understand the difference, but that doesn't mean the migration path should be turned off, restricted to moderators only, or some other drastic measure until we understand the magnitude of the problem.

Answer 9

Something just occurred to me... Are these the only questions you could find a problem with?

I just did a quick scan of questions closed on SO in the last 24 hours. Out of ~90 questions, only 4 were sent to P.SE. Out of those four, one is currently closed, and one is locked. I'm starting to wonder if this is all just a tempest in a teapot...

There are at least 2 users with access to the 10K/moderator tools on both SO and P.SE, so perhaps one of them can shed some light on the scale of the problem. I'm not sure it's worth getting too worked up about a tiny handful of debatable migrations.

Answer 10

Out of the 5 voters closing a question, how many have to choose "belongs on programmers SE" for it to get migrated there? It might be worthwhile to require a programmers moderator to approve it if the vote isn't high enough.

Another idea might be to require a certain reputation on the other site in order to vote to migrate it there.

Answer 11

I feel like the crux of the problem is that to myself and many other users (based on other discussions on meta), everything on Programmers looks like garbage.

Seriously. I'm truly, sincerely baffled why people who find Stack Overflow valuable would want to throw out its defining characteristics, but that's exactly what happened. And the examples you gave don't strike me as any worse than anything else I've seen on Programmers.

I'm not saying this to be a jerk, but those of us who don't find anything on Programmers to be worthwhile are fundamentally incapable of determining which questions belong there and which don't. You're asking us to make a distinction which for us does not exist. Despite the FAQ and the other discussions on meta, I cannot comprehend why some questions are considered good on Programmers and some are not.

Answer 12

Sort of update for readers who may wonder why this question was suddenly reopened. This was apparently triggered by recent comment at MSO:

^{your "lead by example" hand-waving looks really funny now @Shog9 when it turned that real solution is at the side of Stack Overflow (update migration path - see dupe target of the question you referred). While we're at it, got any advice on how to update FAQ to prevent questions from folks banned and warned at SO?}

The matter of fact is, no amount of FAQ'ing, no matter how many upvotes go to this misleading advice, can help against such an enormous pressure as migrations aided by Stack Overflow UI. Issue was resolved only by removing Programmers from migration targets.

• ^{In that sense one can argue that duplicate closure of this question was right, as the issue raised was really resolved at the dupe target, not by wishy-washy advice given here.}

Note that same later happened to Server Fault. No matter how they polished their site documentation, no matter how they tried, the only thing that helped them get rid of the flood of inappropriate questions was removal of the site from migration targets:

^{The % of rejected migrations has been getting steadily higher for quite a while now. Coupled with the small number of migrations that actually result in good (defined as up-voted) answers, keeping this path seems increasingly pointless. ServerFault has been removed as a default migration target on Stack Overflow...}