Question migration process revisited

I’ve always felt like closing as off-topic instead of voting to migrate was a weird way to go about moving the questions to where they should have been posted. So I’d like to propose the following workflow:

  1. Someone posts a question on the wrong site.
  2. Users click “wrong site” (somewhere near “close”, “flag” and other related action text-buttons) and select the correct site.
    • Any users should be able to vote to move to another site, but maybe different reputation thresholds should be indicated as such, like users with <300 rep (by SE, not SO standards) who are not very trusted with that, should only bear a recommending vote, and not count towards N votes required to move.
    • Questions should have unique Post IDs across all sites, so that the users can go to a [Topic dot SiteName dot com slash Post ID] link and it will lead them to the current url of where the post has been moved. This is for when people bookmark their posts’ original URLs and don’t find them at original location.

I think removing the mention of “closing” the question just because it was posted on the wrong site should help with the negative emotions which we’re all familiar with.

BTW I come from background of mostly using sites other than SO and while I get the SO’s attitude of trying to never migrate crap, I think this isn’t as big of a problem on all other smaller sites, and we can have a friendlier attitude towards this process, by changing the connotation from “closed because this is bad” to just moving it transparently to the poster, avoiding any emotional turmoil at all.

.——————————

Additionally, maybe there’s merit in educating migration voters about which posts don’t belong on certain sites by regularly showing them feedback stats on what ended up happening to the posts they voted to migrate. This is a whole other topic, about reviews and educating reviewers, but I just thought I’d mention it here because I don’t have a concrete proposal on this matter yet.

4 Likes

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Question Migration