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Currently, the only way to ask for something to be migrated to a site that isn't part of the standard migration path is through a custom mod note.

I currently have two active custom mod notes on Stack Overflow that ask for migration that are not standard targets for SO. I believe the questions could be better answered on another site.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, the questions have been answered, and answers have been up voted and accepted. At this point, a week and a half later, migrating either of the questions would be disruptive to both communities and not necessarily produce a better answer (they've got accepted answers). The unfortunate part is I really do believe that both questions could have gotten better answers and more attention on another site.

What I would like to see is a more streamlined way to flag for moderator attention for migrations.

The UI would look something like this:

This would allow people to find the proper site easily. No more "Migrate this to Mathamatica.SE" because, well, that doesn't exist. Something that I didn't do on this mock up is add a link to the corresponding help/on-topic page for the target site. Something people could check and click before hitting the submit button.

I don't have this quite right again, because while that shows a "closing for off topic", this is a flag and not a vote to close.

The "flag for migration" is only one part of this though. The other part would be to make another flag queue style thingy for moderators in which they could look at just migration flags created through the above interface.

By providing the mods with a "just migration" view into the flags, questions that should be migrated can be quickly identified from the multitude of existing flags and handled promptly before the migration would be disruptive.

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    I would also suggest a Off-Topic section on the flag page. (Currently is it Flag=> Close for an other Reason=> Off-topic => Migrate), which I think could be alot better
    – Frames Catherine White
    Commented Jan 17, 2014 at 4:51
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    @oxinabox I like that idea - that information is read into the tour page somehow, it would be nice to see it available on flag target page. I'll see about adding it to the mockup at some point in the not distant future (longer than 6-8 hours, but less than 6-8 days).
    – user213963
    Commented Jan 17, 2014 at 15:20
  • for the other part, see also: Suggested migrations review at target site
    – gnat
    Commented Dec 8, 2014 at 12:11
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    An easy temporary fix would be to add some description to the closing wizard about what to do if you do not find the site you thought of in the list.
    – wigy
    Commented Mar 19, 2015 at 11:55
  • I think this is a great solution to help the mods move a question: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/265535/…
    – Shawn
    Commented Apr 9, 2015 at 23:09
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    Recently I wanted to flag a question on SE as Off Topic. But the question seemed fine for graphicdesign.SE. I was surprised that Flagging>Closing>Off-Topic>Migration included seemingly unrelated stacks. I ended up just flagging for Blatantly off-topic, which while the correct action does not really help the asker. I did make a comment point to the correct Stack to re ask their question.
    – hoss
    Commented May 29, 2015 at 15:29
  • This deserves more attention that it got
    – YakovL
    Commented Aug 19, 2018 at 18:08
  • It would be very good if the SE could finally find a solution to deal with the misguided questions. For example like it has been suggested in this question: move these questions to the right place, instead of voting them dishonorably. The right word would be: nominating. Every question could start in lobby and nominated to site.
    – SchLx
    Commented Dec 23, 2020 at 17:07

1 Answer 1

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While this could be a good idea, I would like to point out a problem.

Migration should happen if following criteria is met on a question:

  1. The question is blatantly off-topic for the current site.
  2. But the question's quality is high.
  3. Question is on-topic for the target site.

Note that simply meeting #3 is not enough. Maybe it's okay for the question to remain in the current site. If we have an open ended migration flag, people will start flagging boundary questions that are okay to remain in the current site. And the number of boundary questions are actually huge in my opinion.

So ultimately this will make life hard for moderators. It takes a mere 10 seconds to flag a post but it takes a considerable time and mental labor to decide if a post should really be migrated. And we have very few moderators compared to the number of people who have review rights.

So my opinion is that we should not make flagging for migration easy.

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    Voted down for the simple reason that the current migration system does not work either. I'm also not so sure about (1) and (2). With regards to (1), the user has a good chance to get a better answer on the other site. With regards to (2), yes, we may burden the other site with additional moderation, but they are the experts over there and are much better in distinguishing off topic questions or duplicates (and dupes may still serve as a good method of pointing to answers).
    – Maarten Bodewes
    Commented Oct 18, 2014 at 13:36
  • @owlstead: I respect your choice to downvote, but (0) What do you mean by "migration system does not work"? Have you seen the statistics? (1) Regarding your doubts about my points #1 and #2: Don't migrate crap.
    – sampathsris
    Commented Oct 18, 2014 at 14:26
  • I work mainly on crypto. It doesn't work there as the mods (probably) don't know how to handle these niche tags. As for the second link, I personally think that the overly expansive "question" in the second link should be regarded as crap itself; if there is knowledge there it requires a pretty good sieve to get it out.
    – Maarten Bodewes
    Commented Oct 18, 2014 at 14:37

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