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Travel.SE and outdoors.SE have overlap. Some question may fit on either site, or may be a better fit on one than on the other. For example, I wanted to propose to move this question on skiing to outdoors.SE, where I feel it belongs better.

Can we get an option belongs on outdoors.stackexchange.com when proposing to close a question as off-topic?

Screenshot of "Question is off-topic"

I'm not sure if the particular question is off-topic. I don't think it is, I just think it would be more on-topic on outdoors.SE, and outdoors.SE badly needs more traffic to their site.

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  • Incidentally, I just migrated one on skiing with a jacket to Great Outdoors. It was a valid skiing question, but had no travel component whatsoever. So that's an example where it makes sense to move it.
    – Mark Mayo
    Commented Nov 7, 2012 at 13:30

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Well it got migrated anyway, so that's fine. However, I felt 2 points were worth raising:

1) Just because it's more on-topic on one site doesn't make it any less on-topic on another site necessarily. We had a question on travelling to see the eclipse, or another on travelling to see auroras. One might have gone to the astronomy.se site to raise it, or the travel one. And it would have been equally valid to ask either question on either SE site. (Well actually that wouldn't be for me to say - they're valid on here, and I suspect they'd be valid on the other SE site). We shouldn't move something just because it's more appropriate elsewhere if it's also appropriate here - think from the new user's point of view - if they asked the aurora question after signing up, then come back to find their question has been sent elsewhere, it gives the impression they've done something wrong, AND they have to make an account on the other SE site. Now if it's genuinely in the wrong place, sure, we'll move it, and please do flag it for us.

2) Migrating traffic to another SE site because they need traffic is NOT a valid reason to migrate it either. They'll grow if successful, and they won't if not. It took us a long time to increase our traffic and it required a lot of hard work making sure we had the right questions on here as well. Some SE sites were apparently 'too niche' - one I'm particularly disappointed about was Astronomy.SE - but it didn't get the input desired during its time in beta - which is why we have betas, and it was closed down. By all means ask questions and answer questions and contribute to all betas, but we shouldn't be farming questions out to them as it dilutes the pool of sites as well as what makes us distinct.

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StackExchange migrate dialog box

I don't know whether non-moderators can see this, but I get an option to type in a name for a website on the StackExchange network to migrate to (as shown above). If you cannot see this, I'm guessing it's because you don't have enough reputation (yet!).

Alternatively, StackExchange may be playing around with the migrate dialog box. I found this post on Meta StackOverflow which says a change in the migrate dialog box is 'by design'. I'm sure their UI designers have their reasons for this, if this is indeed the case.

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    Hmm, I wonder why they would limit this option to high-rep. users, given that proposing to close a question already requires quite a bit of reputation...
    – gerrit
    Commented Oct 28, 2012 at 22:36
  • proposing to close a question still requires other people's input - whereas mods can transfer immediately a post to another website (we usually negotiate with other mods to make sure they want it). I don't believe it's a rep thing, it's a mod thing only, as far as I'm aware.
    – Mark Mayo
    Commented Oct 29, 2012 at 2:41
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    This is a mod-only feature, regular users can only migrate along the hardcoded migration paths, not to any other site.
    – user3447
    Commented Oct 29, 2012 at 8:34
  • @MadScientist: So can a site request another specific site be added to its list of hardcoded migration paths? Is that how it works?
    – hippietrail
    Commented Oct 29, 2012 at 14:00
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    @hippietrail Yes. SE generally expects some evidence that the migration path is needed, so you'll have to collect some data on successful migrations to that site.
    – user3447
    Commented Oct 29, 2012 at 14:31
  • @MadScientist: Are there things we or our mods should do to provide such evidence, or is that something SE does itself by analyzing stats? It's been suggested to me that's it's not even worth asking since both sites are still in beta...
    – hippietrail
    Commented Oct 30, 2012 at 2:39
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So far we have only one migration target: Meta.Travel.SE. IMHO this is far too minimalistic. I think we could add Outdoors to the list of target sites, since we do share some scope and we've had questions migrated to and from them.

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  • I think that (like Expats) we have to wait until GO comes out of beta. It looks a bit healthier than Expats though, so maybe that will happen soon?
    – CMaster
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 8:28
  • As I answered in the Aviation question, I don't think we can demonstrate the need for a TGO default migration path yet, although the case is somewhat better than for Aviation.
    – choster
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 14:46

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