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I've read a few of the discussions relating to migrating off-topic questions and haven't got to the bottom of why the list cannot be expanded beyond Meta and SO.

There's been a few observations that the need isn't there, but I'd beg to differ - I've come accross a few Windows questions. I can either vote that they are closed or flag them and hope that a moderator moves them to a more appropriate site. In fact, I'd (guesstimate) that I've come accross more Windows questions than programming ones. Oddly enough, I have an option to vote to migrate to SO but not to any other site.

Is there a downside to having some of the popular computing sites listed in addition to SO? Such as Super User and Server Fault? If there is a limit, then maybe swap SO for one of the other two?

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    SO is currently trailing a new triage feature and there has been a suggestion that this could be extended with a broader migration capability - meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/278648/… - which is likely more widely useful across the SE network should the proposed triage extension get implemented
    – RobV
    Commented Dec 9, 2014 at 12:37
  • @RobV - they must have read my mind :-p Let's hope it works and is implemented accross all sites.
    – garethTheRed
    Commented Dec 9, 2014 at 12:45

2 Answers 2

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The main sites we would probably want new paths to are superuser (SU), serverfault (SF), and askubuntu (AU). I'd be fine with SU for when we get Windows questions; I think it's fairly rare, but I don't see a downside. I mentioned the downsides to the others here. People outside of SF don't understand their unique policies, so virtually all of the requests we get to migrate there are wrong. We've only migrated one post there in the last three months -- they rejected it. Historically AU was worse; any question with "Ubuntu" in the body would get flagged for migration there, even if it had nothing to do with Ubuntu. I haven't seen that happen recently, so we could potentially try it, but I think that one is much more open to bad migrations than SU.

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  • A migration path to SU and AU would help considerably. Fair enough about SF's "unique policy" (very diplomatic). Is there a down side to having migration requests rejected? As we tend to close non-SO questions due to the lack of migration path, would it not be better to at least try to migrate first? If that gets us nowhere then we close, but at least we've tried.
    – garethTheRed
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 6:32
  • @garethTheRed No downside other than annoying that site with questions they don't want. We shouldn't migrate posts that we know don't belong there, but if we're reasonably sure they'd want it then we might as well try. People should really flag questions that need to be migrated, and we rarely get flags requesting it, but I don't know if that's because we don't have many questions that need to be migrated or because people don't know to do that and just vote to close instead
    – Michael Mrozek Mod
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 6:43
  • Therefore, a possible work around (if at all possible, of course) could be a message on the migration pop-up to the effect that we should flag a question if we think it needs to be moved to an unlisted site. I agree that the majority of us vote to close as "off topic" instead of trying to migrate them, which is unfair on the original poster.
    – garethTheRed
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 6:49
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In the past 90 days (10k only), we've migrated:

Having a migration path does result in more migrations, but still, that's 10 times more to SO than to SU. We don't need a migration path to SU, let alone any other site.

By the way, the statistics do confirm my subjective impression that we get on the order of one programming question per day but Windows questions are more of a monthly occurrence.

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    Can't those statistics be read another way? - Because we have a migration path to SO, 55 questions were moved there. But as there is no simple path (OK, a flag is not that difficult) to the others, only a few are migrated and others are simply closed, consequently not showing up in the stats.
    – garethTheRed
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 6:27
  • @garethTheRed As I wrote in my answer, the migration path justifies more migrated questions, but not a 10:1 ratio. I still read a majority of questions on the site and I don't get the impression that we fail to migrate the ones that should migrated to SU, I see a lot fewer of them than programming questions.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 9:42
  • Note that your stats don't include questions that were closed here instead of migrated, case point unix.stackexchange.com/q/169894/41104
    – Braiam
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 15:05
  • @Braiam I do note this in my answer. For the third time, I don't think that the number of such questions is large enough to warrant a migration path.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Dec 5, 2014 at 19:31

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