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For example, this question was closed (and rightly so) for asking for software recommendations.

Couple of problems:

  1. The fact that the question was closed makes little sense, because why ask OP to ask the question elsewhere when a mod could just move the question to the correct site? It sounds like that would be less duplicated effort and increase user retention.

  2. If you actually click on the links in the banner message you see that they are very unhelpful for new users. Probably because the text was written before "the community" decided that software recommendation questions were offtopic and https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ was launched (I guess).

So, I think we:

  1. should just move these questions instead of closing them, leaving behind a redirect.

  2. update the text in these banners.

How do we achieve (2) and why don't we do (1)?

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  • 3
    For #1: sites only have 5 "slots" for community members to vote on migration and those are currently set to go to 1. Meta Superuser 2. Stack Overflow 3. Server Fault 4. Web Apps 5. Android. In order to add Software recommendations one of those currently would have to be removed. Another thing is that many software recommendation requests do not meet the question quality guidelines of Software Recommendations
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Apr 17 at 8:57
  • 1
    In all my time participating in Super User I have to date, seen zero questions, that should be migrated to Software Recommendations SE
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 17 at 12:05
  • @Ramhound So, for example, softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/90362/… should be left closed on superuser?
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 21 at 14:21
  • @Gantendo - I personally wouldn’t have voted to migrate that question
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 21 at 16:08
  • @Ramhound What would need to be improved in order to convince you to vote to migrate it? I am trying to understand your reasoning. I am not even sure if I agree or disagree because I don't think I understand you.
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 21 at 16:10
  • 3
    I'm semi-active on both and I have no idea why people claim that some quality standards wouldn't be met on softwarerecs. Lots of questions that were closed here end up with exactly the same content on there, often with upvotes too. The mods are even a bit too lenient there sometimes I'd say, leaving some horrible quality 0 effort questions open, 100x worse than the example above. And the 5 entries limitation is so badly designed, honestly. Leaving questions here only encourages further similar questions as they appear in Google often with much higher frequency than on softwarerecs.
    – Destroy666
    Commented Apr 22 at 16:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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We don't do 1 because the bar for migrations should be fairly high. If a question is of high quality, and the wrong site, we migrate it. As a former software recommendations mod, I'd probably be deeply annoyed if that got migrated, and kick it back over to Super User.

(Actually there's the occasional rumble about "why do we migrate anyway? It is something that has not scaled well... but that's a hornets nest to kick over another time)

Software recommendations being banned actually came very early on in the history of the network the details got clarified over time - and while software recs exists (and comes after the recommendations ban), some questions might not be a good fit for that or hardware recommendations. Its also in the FAQ (even if I feel we need to go back to a single screen TLDR edition), so its documented.

I'd feel like if a question needs just a little polish - and one feels its salvageable, it might be worth commenting, and letting OP know about the other site(s) and suggest how to fix it before flagging for migration.

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  • Imagine if we wanted to change the banners for some reason, where are they located and how could we change them?
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 17 at 9:13
  • 1
    If I recall correctly, you'd need a meta post with suggested wordings and broad support, then we'd kick it up to the community team to change it
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Apr 17 at 9:17
  • 1
    Well, it may be a hornets nest, but the highest quality (and I use that term very loosely) software recommendation request is something like softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/90362/… (which is of course far from perfect) and if that is not good enough to migrate then migrating to softwarerecs is basically always a bad idea. So then I should perhaps stop mentioning softwarerecs when telling people that software recommendation requests are offtopic.
    – Gantendo
    Commented Apr 21 at 18:36

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