Migration flags should be more general than “questions about video games”

Question

Recently, I tried to flag https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/31792/how-does-one-keep-up-a-poker-face as “Definitely off topic: Probably Board-Gaming related (maybe not even that)”. Unfortunately, when flagging as off-topic, the only options are

• Questions about video games are off-topic here, but can be asked on Arqade.
• Questions about the development of video games are off-topic here, but can be asked on the Game Development Stack Exchange.
• This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network
  • It belongs on meta.rpg.stackexchange.com – discussion, support, and feature requests for this site

There is no generic “Definitely off-topic, but I don't know where it would belong” option, and it would also be nice to add options for the three other Stack Exchange sites I have often seen migration suggestions to, so I would expand this list by:

• Questions about fictional settings are generally off-topic here (unless the setting is nearly exclusively a role playing setting) and should be asked on Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange
• Questions concerning historical settings should be asked on History Stack Exchange
• Questions about board and card games are off-topic here, but can be asked on Board & Card Games Stack Exchange.

(This question is very similar to https://meta.rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/3264/migration-flags-should-be-more-general-than-questions-about-computer-based-game, I stole the title from there, but since that one is marked as status-completed, Thunderforge suggested asking this as a new question.)

Answer 1

doppelgreener covers the general stuff well, but doesn't mention why there are such a dearth of migration options for flag-privilege users.

Basically, StackExchange hates question migration.

There's good reason for the hate. Often, questions are off topic because they're about the wrong subject, but they're also off topic on the target site. In the past these have been migrated, closed by the target site, and then the target site's users have more-or-less politely told the migrating site's users not dump their garbage on them.

Since migration flags were almost always wrong and justified migrations were so rare, they're now the exclusive province of the mods, and removing the almost-never-useful flag options improved the workflow of the site. The only migration options that were retained were ones where the flaggers/voters would usually be right, which is to the site's own Meta.

Answer 2

The totally generic "this is just generally off topic" close reason is already accounted for. Those of us with the privilege to cast close votes get this handy option for a close reason:

... and we get to say basically anything in there, then cast the close vote. What we write in there becomes a comment on the question, and becomes an actual close reason for that question that people can vote for!

That's exactly how gomad's comment came to be:

This question appears to be off-topic because it is about a board game.

And it's what the question was closed for.

Other close vote reasons

These are good requests for well-chosen off topic categories, with one modification: I'd expand the history one to generically state that real-world topics are only acceptable here if an RPG expert would provide better/different/more specific asker than, say, a Historian or Geographer. That is basically our criteria for real-world topics - see the quote box halfway down.

That said, though: there isn't a huge need for them, and as far as I'm aware, close reasons aren't added lightly - it takes work on behalf of the mods and SE team both to add and adjust them, so it's done when it's super necessary.

Video game questions are our most common class of off topic question, but even those we only get once every month or two. Other kinds of off topic questions are much rarer, and for now - until one of them becomes much more common - we can completely make do with the Other field I mentioned.

On that basis, I'm not sure there's a strong need for them to be added - yet! But until then, you can bet people with close vote privileges will swoop in on these questions we don't have a better off topic reason for, and vote to close them with a custom reason. We don't get a huge number of questions here, so every question gets many eyes on it.