2

I was trying to flag a question as off-topic but relevant to be migrated to another StackExchange site (in this case SuperUser). However, the "Migrate to another Stack Exchange" page only lists this meta site.

Would it be possible to get the following sites added to that page?

  • SuperUser
  • Game Developer
  • Board Games
  • Role-playing Games

Is there a reason why these options have not yet been included?

3
  • Because the amount of migrations to them are minimal? There's really no reason to add them unless we migrate on a regular basis, and we barely ever migrate anything. – Frank Apr 9 '16 at 14:01
  • 1
    Could you not also argue that you aren't doing many migrations because the option is not there? The lack of options would force the user to just flag the question as a general "off-topic". – Burgi Apr 9 '16 at 14:07
  • 4
    The overriding rule for migrations is, "Don't migrate crap." The very few migration candidates can be handled by the mods. If we did it, we'd be punting junk over left and right. – Frank Apr 9 '16 at 14:08
9

Like Frank pointed out - the main rule of migrations is "don't migrate crap". If a question is good enough to be migrated (and to be honest, this is a very rare occurrence), you can always custom flag it for moderators to take a look, as we have the ability to migrate questions wherever they might need to go.

There's no need to set up a bunch of migration paths when they are very rarely used - this just means we create ways for mods and other site communities to have to potentially deal with questions being migrated to them that really, should have just been closed and left.

1
  • 3
    A bit of data: in 2015, 29 questions were migrated away from Arqade. 9 of those migrations were to meta, 13 were to the four sites you have listed, the remaining 7 were to other sites. At ~one migration per month, it is less work for mods to handle these than to potentially clear up after bad migrations by the community, who do not have access to the same channels as us mods for assessing suitability. – fredley Apr 11 '16 at 10:03
5

Many of Arqade's users don't know the rules and guidelines for other sites. Specifically:

  • Superuser never answer questions about consoles or non-PC hardware/software.
  • GameDev don't allow "how do I get started?" questions, which make up 90% of the game development questions we get here.
  • SoftwareRecs only consider game questions on-topic in certain circumstances. Again, most of the ones here are off-topic.

It's not just about not migrating crap- in a lot of cases it's misguided users trying to migrate questions to where they believe they belong (but where they're just as off-topic).

1
  • thank you for explaining the reasoning behind the lack of migration paths, it makes sense now – user126536 Apr 10 '16 at 20:07

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .