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Hi, recently I flagged as off-topic a question on StackOverflow that was posted two years ago. The flag has been marked as invalid and I'd greatly appreciate your help to understand why, given that another way to know this apparently does not exist (yet)!

As the question is clearly much more related to enthusiast webmasters than programmers I suggested to move it on Pro Webmasters, but I got my flag wight decreased because my flag was marked as invalid. The sole reason I can figure out for this is for the age of the question. Can you confirm my guess? It sounds weird anyway, as other even older questions have been migrated recently.

I have no clue, do you?

Reminder from the FAQ: What kind of questions can I ask here?

Pro Webmasters - Stack Exchange is for professional and enthusiast webmasters. If your question generally covers the operation of websites which you control, then you’re in the right place to ask your question!

Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it. We feel the best Stack Overflow questions have a bit of source code in them, but if your question generally covers …

  • a specific programming problem * a software algorithm * software tools commonly used by programmers * matters that are unique to the programming profession

… then you’re in the right place to ask your question!

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  • just leave it like that ......... imho.
    – YOU
    May 7, 2011 at 13:38

2 Answers 2

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Yes, ordinarily that question should be migrated to Pro Webmasters. However, we don't migrate old questions. The new site doesn't want them either. That has been discussed numerous times here already in the context of other sites. See this question and this other question for more specific details. The consensus seemed to be that it was best to leave them as is on the original site.

So I assume what happened is that a moderator marked your flag as invalid because the particular question that you flagged should not be migrated to Pro Webmasters.

Yes, the better option would have probably been to mark your flag as valid, while still taking no action. But moderators are human, and they sometimes make mistakes. They might not have thought to do this, or they might have just clicked the wrong button. My suggestion is not to worry so much about your flag weight. It's not a problem until you notice that your flags are consistently being marked as invalid.

Keep up the good work in trying to flag off-topic questions! But in the future, please keep in mind that old questions shouldn't generally be flagged for migration--only flag them if one of the other flag reasons applies or if you think that they're hurting something by staying where they are. New questions that you notice would be better suited for another site are still fair game.

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    Something to think about: if the moderator had marked the flag as valid, how would @Guandalino have learned that this was a bad idea? Marking it as invalid means that, going forward, he won't waste time/flags doing that, and that ends up saving mods time as well.
    – Dori
    May 30, 2011 at 4:14
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The question is off-topic on SO, so I'd regard an off-topic flag for that question as valid. It probably shouldn't be migrated as it is old and not exactly high quality.

If it was marked invalid, a moderator either disagreed, misread the question or flag, misclicked or something else happened that I didn't think of.

The moderators on SO go though hundreds of flags each day, the occasional flag will be erroneously marked as invalid. The 10 points flag weight really don't matter, just keep flagging, if you do it right your flag weight will increase.

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    +1 Oh right, even moderators are human being and can do mistakes!
    – Paolo
    May 7, 2011 at 14:05

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