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We had another debateable migration: Password security in databases - today still best practice?

That question got migrated from StackOverflow. At the time it was migrated, it already had multiple answers, some of them with many votes. Unfortunately, some of the highly-voted answers have advice of debateable merit. This is not ideal, because StackOverflow has many more voters than IT Security does, and it means our community is outvoted by folks who aren't even a member of our community. This makes it infeasible for our community to take responsibility for the accuracy of the page for others who may find it on our site in the future, which is an unfortunate side effect of migration.

Also problematic about this migration is that similar questions have been asked before on this site and have been answered in depth. The migrated question is basically a duplicate. Unfortunately the poster of this question and some of the answerers seem to be unaware of the state of the art or the good material that is already available on this site about this topic.

Of course there will always be situations where we have inaccurate, low-quality, or duplicative questions and answers on our site, but I think we should try to avoid the avoidable ones. (And I should say I have no beef with migration in general; I think it's great that moderators looking out for questions that might be better-suited to our site. I would just prefer that they followed our criteria before migrating.)

I have written before about bad migrations of this sort, but the recurrence suggests to me we don't yet have this licked. Do others agree that this is undesirable? If they do, what can we do to prevent repeat occurrences?

P.S. My goal is not to call out people for blame, but rather to ask for constructive suggestions about how we can maximize the quality of this site going forward.

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    Regarding the migrated votes, check Meta Stack Exchange for existing threads on the issue. I know there's at least one or two, but I'm not sure what the current overall status is.
    – Iszi
    Commented Mar 1, 2012 at 6:06
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    Ah, here's the thread. Looks like SEI still hasn't put a status tag on it. meta.stackexchange.com/q/87031/152399
    – Iszi
    Commented Mar 1, 2012 at 6:10
  • The voting problem is even worse while it stays on SO.
    – CodesInChaos
    Commented Mar 1, 2012 at 22:34
  • When an answer is flawed, please add a comment explaining its flaws. In that question the accepted answer was obviously flawed, but most others seemed decent, but not optimal.
    – CodesInChaos
    Commented Mar 1, 2012 at 22:42
  • @CodeInChaos, good advice! Thanks. Two caveats: (1) In this case many of the answers already had so many comments that any new comment would have been hidden behind the scroll by default (at least, until others clicked to view all comments and upvoted it). (2) In some cases, explaining all of the ways the answer could be improved or might be flawed takes more space than available in a single comment.
    – D.W.
    Commented Mar 2, 2012 at 5:55

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While I agree with your point on some of the 'difficult' ones we have had before (eg this one which if it was voted to close as offtopic by the community would be absolutely fine by me) this one is definitely on topic for us, has vote levels which are not outwith our normal bounds, and actually has a couple of good answers.

So I discussed this with mods before it was migrated over as I agreed it should be here. I didn't see it as a duplicate (similar, yes, but not a full dupe) but if you do think it is, please vote to close as dupe. Enough votes and it will get closed as one.

If something is offtopic elsewhere and ontopic here it still makes sense to migrate it and then close or merge.

Usually we do get to discuss before questions are migrated over. Sometimes not, but that is fine in most cases. We can always close, merge, delete if necessary. The only problem is when there are higher votes than those we can generate here, and as @Iszi mentioned in the comment above, there is an ongoing request for vote reset on migration, but we have no update as yet.

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