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Now that it is harder to get a question migrated then closes as “off topic”, could we allow migration votes still to be casted after a questions has been closed as “of topic”?

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The reason that those changes have been made was to prevent poor quality questions from being dumped on another unsuspecting SE site. There's no reason to turn around and make it easier again.

If you come across a closed question that you honestly think is of high enough quality that it should have been migrated to another site, then you can flag it for moderator attention to have it migrated. Moderators can migrate questions even if they have already been closed.

The system already solves this problem. I can't see the need for a new feature.

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    Yes, currently closing something as off topic is the best way we [mods] have to stop a pending and potentially bad migration.
    – user50049
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 9:11
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There are really two separate issues lumped together when voting to close:

  • Is this question on-topic?
  • Is this question of acceptable quality?

Most of the problems with migrations seemed to be when the answers to both questions were a resounding "no". If, and only if, the answers are "no" and "yes" respectively, does the question of where to migrate to become relevant. When a question is both off-topic and bad, migrating it to where it belongs so that it can be closed there is a waste of everyone's time.

This seemed particularly noticeable with programmers.SE, which is technically where a lot of bad, non-constructive questions on SO would be most accurately placed, but SO users really, really should be able to recognize those as junk in the first place.

So, allowing migrations to be done after closing would likely be counterproductive unless it had some way of aggressively preventing migration of terrible questions--perhaps requiring that all 5 close votes be "off-topic", not other reasons, plus adding an option for "migrate to garbage can" as an anti-migration vote.

But I honestly doubt any of the above is even remotely worth the SE team's time.

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  • Part of the problem is that when programmers.se was first talk about, it was seen as a way of pulling the "garbage" away from SO.
    – Ian Ringrose
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 15:01
  • @Ian Ringrose: Even with overly generous assumptions about what is appropriate on programmers.SE, some questions are just blatantly worthless. Obvious flamebait, incoherent nonsense, requests for advice on very localized issues... stuff that would never even result in a worthwhile discussion. My impression is that programmers.SE was never about utter rubbish, just fluffy-but-useful questions that SO has become more aggressively opposed to.
    – McCannot
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 15:16
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I think you're right and it should be considered by administrators.

  • Users should be able to vote after of-topic close

or

  • Moderators should migrate questions rather than close them if they fit to any SE site
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    Moderators can already do this, whether or not the question has been closed.
    – Cody Gray - on strike
    Commented Jul 7, 2011 at 9:10

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