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I'm a high-rep user from Gaming.stackexchange, and I'm a little confused as to whether this should be posted to the Gaming meta, the Web Apps meta, or Meta Stack Overflow. I went with the latter, because I think there's a potentially larger issue relevant to stack exchange as a whole

Anyway, web apps recently sent This Question our way. What they presumably weren't aware of was that we already had this question, and closed it for being off-topic and not a real question.

Basically, we seem to have run into an issue of validity -- the question was migrated without the understanding that it was inappropriate for the site it was being migrated to.

I'm not quite sure where to go from here (I do agree that Web Apps isn't the proper forum for the question either), but I'm trying to figure out how (if) a site should be able to "reject" migrations, if said migration doesn't properly place the question. (And perhaps express a little jealousy that WebApps can migrate questions to us in the first place; we can still only migrate to our meta )

This question stuck out as particularly baffling because the body and title were identical. Ultimately, I don't predict much effect from the migration - the question will be closed in due order for the same reasons as before - but I can't help but think the migration process could stand to be streamlined in some fashion to avoid such migration hot potato in the first place.

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  • That was a migration by a mod, users on Webapps cannot migrate to Gaming. Moderators can migrate to any site on the network.
    – Mad Scientist
    Jun 20, 2011 at 5:50
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    as Bill and Michael pointed out, this can only be done by diamond mods. The golden rule is "Don't Migrate Crap" and this question was absolutely crap so we'll have to speak with the webapps mod about that..
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jun 20, 2011 at 6:02

1 Answer 1

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The main method for avoiding invalid migrations is by not having migration paths unless they're going to be actively used, and indeed Web Apps doesn't have a migration path to Gaming. Moderators can move posts to any site in the network, and that post was migrated by one of the WA mods. Commonly mods will check with the target site to make sure a post is wanted before migrating like that, so either the WA mod was confident the post would be on-topic, or he couldn't find a Gaming mod to check with.

If you do see a situation like this, flag the post and mention the duplicate link. A gaming mod can delete the post and have a WA mod clear the migration and reclose as off-topic on their end

The more generic problem of sites getting posts migrated when they don't want them has been brought up here many times, but proposed solutions (make mods review each incoming post, for example) haven't gone over well. If you have a specific idea for improving the system by all means mention it, but otherwise it seems to work pretty well right now; cases like the one you encountered are rare

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  • I think this is the way to handle such situations. I usually check, either by searching the target site or asking the mods on the target site, but mistakes do happen.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jun 20, 2011 at 9:17

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