Reset votes on migrated questions

Question

All votes should be reset when a question is migrated. That's votes on the question, in both directions, as well as votes on any answer.

At the moment, downvotes are cleared from the question. Yes, it makes sense on its own, but I don't think this is the right solution.

In my experience, communities vote very differently. A mediocre answer can get a lot of upvotes just because no one on the source site knows better. An easy-looking system installation question on Stack Overflow is sometimes a near-NaRQ on a more appropriate site like SU/SF/U&L, and yet it arrives with plenty of upvotes.

Two migrations in particular triggered this post: 1 2 (discussed here). Now these are old questions which presumably shouldn't have been migrated — but they were, by a moderator, and they are indeed on-topic on the target site — but the votes don't fit.

Browsing the list of questions migrated to U&L, I see that a majority aren't a problem — because they came with very few votes from the original site. So retaining the votes during migration doesn't contribute much. Then why bother?

Please give migrated questions a new life. They might come with answers attached, but let the target community decide what they like. Reset all vote counts on migrations.

Related: and make migrated questions as visible as new questions. For example, Make migrated posts be part of chat RSS feed.

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Adding support from IT Security

Leaving this issue unresolved can especially have adverse effects on younger, smaller sites when the migrated question comes from one of the big ones like SOFU or Programmers.

On the IT Security site, nearly half of the top ten questions by votes are migrated questions:

• #3: What alternatives are there when SSH is being actively filtered?
• #4: What should I do when my boss asks me to fabricate audit log data?
• #6: Do any security experts recommend bcrypt for password storage?
• #9: How can I avoid my password being harvested by key loggers from internet cafes?

There's also five more within the top 50.

Most of the above questions have answers with up-votes carried over from the origin site, which put them (in some cases) inappropriately much higher in the thread than more accurate answers provided by the receiving site. Meanwhile, the receiving site does not have enough active users to counter the relatively massive number of existing votes where it is needed.

Same experience on Computer Science

Many computer science questions are posted on Stack Overflow, and get answers which don't really explain why things are the way they are, or misunderstand the issue. These are poor answers from a computer science point of view, yet the question is a good one and would benefit from a computer science point of view. The ideal fate of such question would be to migrate them from SO to CS, where they will get better answers — but that is not viable if the upvotes on mediocre answers are retained.

Bad for Community Building

Until yesterday, the highest-voted question on Community Building had a score of 61 and an age of over a year, and 66 in over 2 years for the highest-voted answer. That was until a question was migrated in with a score of 98. That new question is on-topic, but it's hardly the best on the site. And the age of the migrated question has nothing to do with it: it was barely a week old. The ratio of votes is the problem.

Answer 1

Yes please! Most questions get migrated with only a vote or two, so it will be no great loss to the question.

The ones that do come with votes are usually wildly skewed one way or the other. Bikeshed questions are hard enough to keep in their place when they don't come in with more vote weight than the target community could have put. Also answer votes are often out of balance because the source community didn't understand the question or have the right knowledge to solve it or judge answers.

Addendum: The primary concern with this historically seems to be the issue of migrating old questions. This is a legitimate concern, but I believe it should be solved another way. Migrating old questions has its own set of problems. It has been suggested that not resetting votes is a good deterrent for migrating old questions that have already collected lots of activity. I suggest that A) having votes reset on highly voted content would actually be more of a deterrent and that B) this is often the most problematic on very new questions.

By that last point, I mean that when a question comes along on a high traffic site, it can pick up answers and a whole pile of votes in just a few minutes. On a lower traffic more specific site that it gets migrated to, these votes are specifically the ones that most need resetting because they were based on the very different standards of the high traffic site.

Addendum 2: The current reputation system already has an interesting guard so that reputation earned on posts that are more than 90 days old is immune to deletion. Even if the posts get deleted as part of some future site cleanup or scope change, that reputation is not lost like reputation earned from recent questions or answers would be. I think this kind of system should be employed for migrations as well. This would incentivise early migration. Experienced users who know a question might belong somewhere else would want to get their VTC's in and the migration on as soon as possible so that they don't loose any potential reputation earned from answer off topic questions in the wrong place. At the same time, it would guard against outrage and give some lee-way to future site cleanup operations.

Answer 2

I'm also in favor of this and hope this question gets some new life.

Take, for example, The Coolest Server Names which got its life on SO and was then migrated to SF. It lived on SO for quite a while gathering answers upon answers and many many upvotes. It was migrated to SF where many of us think it's trash. Now, because of all the attention it received on SO we're having a hard time getting rid of it on SF because it will take hundreds of votes to delete. (We have a meta-SF question going to discuss whether or not to mod-hammer it.)

Answer 3

I would rather this weren't status-declined and appreciate Shog's response as to why this is declined even though it seems to blame all migrated questions rather than addressing votes + or - that are cast by the community that shuns the question itself.

Basically, transferring votes is an odd loophole that enfranchises voters from one site to another site on which they may not even belong.

As a Moderator of a small site - we can either accept or delete a question that arrives due to the votes attached. Our hands are not totally tied, but it seems overly punitive to close something because of the attention it got on another site before it even showed up at our door.

To wit:

• How can I configure Mac Terminal to have color ls output?
• Why is Git not found after installing OS X Lion?
• Got any tips or tricks for Terminal in Mac OS X?

This seems more a case of voting irregularity and when a question shows up with tens or many tens of + votes by people that are not even part of the community now owning the question.

If a feature were proposed to add a function where we let anyone who viewed a question from off-site to adjust the votes on a question, it would be shot down as the craziest idea ever, but this "pre-existing" behavior is grandfathered in as "it's always been that way".

To be specific for a bit. Let's say the median/mean/average votes on a question on Stack Overflow is 85. Let's say the equivalent on a destination site is 5. Now, when a moderately interesting SO question with 20 votes is migrated - you now have a big outlier on a small community.

On the other side - say a question with 100 votes from smallville goes the other way. Now it's just another average voted question.

Worse - down votes on one community don't mean the question is bad or not useful when hosted on a different site with different scope.

I would rather the system discount or discard entirely all votes of the sending community. Having questions arrive with disproportionate vote counts makes the lists that sort by votes not respect the community voting process.

What good comes from moving votes - positive or negative?

We can't go in as moderators and reset votes (like we often reset comments) that are absurd when the question arrives on our sites. The new time-limit restriction on moderation will make this somewhat better, since older questions by their nature have more time to accumulate large net votes.

Still it just seems wrong to me to preserve an external community's set of votes on a question that they themselves have rejected as not their topic of expertise.

Answer 4

I, too, wholeheartedly support this proposal. My case in point is How does one insert a backslash or a tilde (~) into LaTeX? which was migrated from Stack Overflow to tex.sx in January 2011.

Right now, the question still has the third highest number of upvotes at tex.sx (98), has generated the answer with the highest number of upvotes (119) and has about 70k views (the runner-up question has 27k). At the time of migration, it was a menace to tex.sx's benchmark of what constitutes "Good questions" and "Good Answers", and resetting the question's votes would have been a blessing.

Answer 5

This would be a great change; I think it would benefit IT Security.

IT Security has a much smaller community than the big sites like Stack Overflow. On IT Security, we have had a number of cases of questions being migrated from Stack Overflow (or one of the other big sites) to IT Security, where they already had multiple answers and many votes on those answers at time of migration. In many cases, those answers were flawed, but because they came over to IT Security with so many votes from the original site that it is almost impossible for the IT Security crowd to make up for those votes. This is problematic, because it prevents the IT Security community from taking having ownership and control over the material appearing on our site.

I have documented the problem extensively on the following three IT Security Meta pages:

• Downsides of migrating questions from high-volume sites

• When is it appropriate to migrate a question from another site?

• Another debateable migration

You can find there a long list of examples of migrations that were problematic, not because the question is out-of-scope or off-topic, but rather because they came over to us already with so many upvotes on problematic answers.

See also this summary:

• Rejecting incoming migrations with bad answers

Implementing this feature request would benefit IT Security by reducing the number of migrations that are problematic in this way, and would benefit us by making it easier to migrate questions that really belong on IT Security over there even if they already have received a bunch of answers and votes.

Answer 6

If a question I asked received 10 upvotes and then was moved to another site with the votes reset, I think I'd probably be a little irked.

However, I'd like to think I'd also take a step back and realize that the reputation that I do have can map directly to questions and answers that the community felt not only deserved upvotes, but that also deserved to stay within that community as a lasting reference for other users who have similar questions.

After all, the purpose of the Stack Exchange model is to create great, targeted content that addresses real, practical, answerable questions. It's not a popularity contest, and I wouldn't want to have extra reputation for questions or answers that no one can find on the site because the question is on another site instead.

At the same time, it's misleading to see a bad question with 10 upvotes on a site when that question might not warrant 10 upvotes within that community. Oftentimes, moderators may migrate a question to another site where it still doesn't fit. I see this happen on Programmers SE a lot, and for a time it was a dumping ground for bad Stack Overflow questions.

Each community must stand on its own as an independent entity with its own guidelines on what constitutes a great question. Therefore, it seems logical to me that both votes and reputation should be reset on migrated questions.

Let the target community decide if the questions and answers have merit. If it's a great question or answer, it will get upvoted.

Answer 7

I think the diamond moderators of the target site should have a feature to zero out pre-migration votes on a specific question.

That way they can take care of questions with inflated votes, without interfering with every little question that received a handful of votes while waiting for migration.

Answer 8

Migrating questions (and related answers and comments) with votes intact is clearly a problem - particularly for questions migrated from the older high volume sites to smaller, more specialised communities. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that this is an impediment to smaller communities growing their content-base and user-base via migration.

A question which arrives with a number of answers and related comments, but no indication of the community's assessment of their value is not really ideal either. It would be preferable to leave some assessment visible while avoiding the problems of a community being saddled with answers they don't have the mass to override. Instead of resetting all voting, keep votes by users involved in the target site and reset all others.

The criteria for whose vote gets retained will have to be a bit more subtle than just membership of the target site - to remove those who have only participated in one or two unusually high volume items like the XKCD question on security. Maybe at least one answer and one vote outside the target site's top 1% of questions by activity.

Answer 9

Suggestion:

If a question already has multiple answers, or has answers with more than a handful of votes, then I would suggest that it should not be migrated. It should either be left on the original site, or the original question should be closed and a new question should be created on the other site.

Reason:

IT Security has many fewer voting members than Stack Overflow. Migrated questions come to IT Security with lots of answers and heavy vote volumes. IT Security doesn't have enough voting members to come anywhere near that; very few questions on this site get anywhere near that many votes from users of IT Security. Thus, at this point, the votes from the original site are going to overwhelm votes from the IT Security community, for that question. I don't like having a question and its answers listed on the IT Security site when the votes are overwhelmingly from some other site and when the IT Security community effectively does not have ability to perform quality control of the answers.

Answer 10

I think it should be up to the recipient community to decide whether "zero out votes" or "retain votes" is the right option for them.

Most of the questions migrated from Stack Overflow to mathematica.SE had about the right number of votes when they arrived and attracted a few extra, but not many. (Most of us knew not to vote for the same question twice.) Also, these posts are old now and might not be seen by many members of the new community.

A lot of migrated questions might well have the "wrong" number of votes for the recipient community, but you should not assume this is always true. I think many people would be unhappy if questions and answers that they spent a lot of time effort on were zeroed out. So you lose all the reputation on the original site and you have to hope that the new community notices an old post and upvotes it the way they would if it was new.

Proposals to zero out votes should be discussed on the recipient site's meta and actioned by the moderators there.

Answer 11

I agree with the sentiment of this request, especially when migrations are from a large site such as Stack Overflow to a smaller site. Nevertheless, I think that "throwing away" the reputation points from the original is not ideal either.

I believe that at present posts over a certain age keep their reputation points even after deletion. I propose that a similar mechanism be applied here: established posts which are migrated should not strip the author of points on the origin site.

Answer 12

Some questions are legitmate questions for the original site they're posted on, but are migrated because the intended site is a better one for the specific topic. I don't think the asker should be penalized when he asked a question that just happened to be on-topic for more than one site.

It's even more penalizing if you figure on resetting votes on answers, as your last paragraph seems to imply. Now you're penalizing those who in good faith gave a good answer.

Heck, the rep involved might get the asker/answerer involved in the migrated-to site, and the community wins.

Answer 13

I have two concerns regarding this proposal:

1. Some people do have more than one expertise and are able and competent enough to answer (yet-to-be-determined) off-topic questions if it involves one of their (other) expertises. If a question regarding volleyball would occur on SO, I could maybe answer it in a decent way and earn votes and maybe even accepts from others on SO that know something about the sport. Dropping all votes would mean you don't care about me knowing about this stuff, or about the others acknowledging that I make sense (or not!) in my answer (or question for that matter).
2. If the question is migrated, I'd have to live with dropping in rep because the votes would be cleared? Not sure if I'd be happy with that.

(Yes, volleyball is an awkward example; the unix example might fit better but then I'd give the wrong impression about knowing something about that.)

This might seem egocentric to some point and give the impression of me being a rep-hunter. Well, in a way that's the nature of this system but I'm not one to crave every single rep point I get. As mentioned above it's also about the (few?) people in the community who do know what they're doing when up- or downvoting a question or answer on a topic that is not really fit for the site (SO for example).

That being said, I will not lose sleep over this feature being added. I understand the points that Gilles has made in his post. And I have no view on the numbers but I guess it's not a very large amount of questions that needs migration and of those I assume the community and moderators will spot them early on before the question has seen alot of answers or other activity.

Then again, that last argument might as well mean it's not worth the effort to add the proposed feature ..

Answer 14

I think doing this would undermine the reputation system's use as an incentive to drive participation, while I don't see how not doing so harms it.

Here's a scenario:

• A new question is asked on an appropriate SE site.
• I provide an answer that is popular and gets upvoted.
• A new more specific SE site is created that is a better match for the question.
• The question gets migrated, but because it is no longer a hot topic, the question and answer do not receive another round of upvotes, and the original is lost.

So, I have made an investment in either asking or answering a question, been rewarded for it with reputation points, only to see that swept away because a new stack was created that the question is a better fit for.

And save me the speech about how people should contribute for the good of the community and not reputation points. The reputation system is there for a reason -- it was designed with significant thought and is something we want people to care about, and is one of the reasons the SE system has quality answers. Yanking away votes and reputation can cause people to lose faith in the system, and make them less likely to participate.

Answer 15

I liked this idea originally, but the more I've thought about it, and the more actual migrations I've reviewed, the more convinced I've become that the problem isn't the voting - it's the posts themselves.

If you have a question asked and answered on one site, then shoved into another (where, as you note, the culture may be rather different) the voting is really the least of your problems. Rather,

A mediocre answer can get a lot of upvotes just because no one on the source site knows better. An easy-looking system installation question on Stack Overflow is sometimes a near-NaRQ on a more appropriate site like SU/SF/U&L, and yet it arrives with plenty of upvotes.

The answers are the problem. More specifically, an answer that's had time to collect a lot of up-votes, accolades, bounties, perhaps even an accept checkmark is a problem when it's seen as sub-par on the destination site.

Like it or not, there's no way to implement a time-machine for migration that'll turn back the clock to when the question was originally posted. Resetting votes is - at best - a band-aid solution.

Therefore, I think the better option is to simply disable migration for older questions entirely. See: Disable migration for questions older than 60 days