Can we have StackOverflow added as a site we can migrate questions to

Question

On the close question dialog we can only close as off topic to meta.askdifferent can we please have some other options - The main missing one is stackoverflow.

I have asked this before but was told that we would get some choices when we got out of beta but this has not happened. Also the suggested solution then was to flag for a moderator but as in this question even if the moderator thinks it should be on SO the question is just closed.

This has also been asked and approved here is this going to happen?

Answer 1

Diamond mods can migrate questions to sites not on that list. They (hopefully) only do this in consultation with the receiving site's moderators unless it's a very obvious case, a very high-quality question, and they've checked for duplicates.

We (SE) will not approve migration paths willy-nilly. The hard truth is that too often, users migrate questions to sites where a duplicate already exists or where the question isn't actually on-topic. Additionally, there's a tendency to migrate garbage questions that should be closed as a way to get rid of them without risking hurting the asker's feeling by closing -- thus simply moving problems around so someone else has to deal with them.

Migration paths are only created when there is a history of many good migrations having happened between site A and site B.

If your moderators and the SO moderators think the question belongs on SO, it will make it there (perhaps slowly, as the mods need to find one another online to discuss it).

Answer 2

The moderators here can and do migrate things to any site that accepts inbound questions - just pop an "other" flag with comments that you want it to be migrated to another site (especially if you have reputation on that site or have cleared the migration in the destination chat room before flagging). In reality, our site doesn't have enough people to migrate a question without moderator intervention and with the new timeframe to migrate things - most questions will just get closed as off topic and not actually migrated going forward.

Just to put some data behind the rationale - in the last 90 days our site migrated three questions. One to this meta, one to SuperUser and one to GIS.

For the calendar year 2012, we have 19 question migrations outbound:

• 6 - SuperUser
• 5 - Our Meta
• 2 - Stack Overflow
• 1 - Unix, User Experience, Server Fault, DBA, GIS

Of the 19 migrations, not a single one was done by users without moderator assistance. Even a slam dunk migration like the 5 questions about the site that users can surely self-migrate to our meta are not being seen and migrated in practice by the users of the site. If we find a large change in these migration numbers - it might be worth bugging for a code change to alter the user-migration sites, but I would expect the developers to remove any user migrations based on our usage statistics and not add them.