Migrated questions show wrong number of answers?

Question

Today I noticed a question that had been migrated from SO to Programmers.

1 vote 0 answers 38 views

How To Deal With Terrible Design Decisions [migrated]

I'm a consultant at one company. There is another consultant who is a year older than me and has been here 3 months longer than I have, and a full time developer. The full-time developer is great.

Right now, on Programmers, it actually has 11 votes, 12 answers, 671 views.

I haven't noticed that behavior before, although that certainly doesn't mean anything. Nowadays I'm lucky if I notice whether I've put on pants before I leave the house. That behavior--wrong counts on the site a question migrates from--like much of my own behavior, seems a little odd.

I read through many of the similar questions. I understand that SE has reduced the number of cross-database queries. I can certainly support that idea. Is this odd behavior just a main effect of that?

Answer 1

When a question is migrated, it and its answers are copied to the destination site, and the answers on the source question are deleted.

So technically, the stats are correct: there are 0 answers because all of them have been deleted or were posted on the Programmers.SE version of the question.

The side effect of this is that the question could be re-opened on the source site by a moderator and act as a separate entity, garnering its own comments, answers, views, and votes. This happens rarely, but it does happen from time to time.