Stop sending things to SuperUser to die!!

Question

I'm seeing SO MANY questions lately that should be KILLED ON THE SPOT that are simply being moved to SuperUser as a way to get rid of them.

This should not be done. I don't know if people are scared of making the decision to kill a question, or if they want to give it "one more chance" but questions that DON'T BELONG THERE should not be sent there as a way to get rid of them.

This question: https://serverfault.com/questions/164240/why-is-classful-addressing-obsolete-closed should have just been closed as a dupe or off topic or not a real question or something appropriate. It does not belong on SU.

This is the most recent one, but I've seen it happen dozens of times lately. More often actually, maybe because we're starting to get more 10k users.

Personally I don't use SU but I know that this must be pissing them off to no end.

Answer 1

I'm starting to wonder if this is something that needs to be hammered out more fully here on Meta. A lot of people seem to think that SU exists to answer the questions that are too basic (or in the example above, too poorly phrased) for SF.

I'm not sure how to make the point that SU and SF address different topics entirely, and it's absolutely not a complexity-divide. I'd say SU should just send them back where they started, so those questions can be shot & buried on our dime, as it were.

Should there be a mechanism for a site to reject question migration? A question-purgatory where users of sufficient rep can vote on whether to keep or reject the question?

Answer 2

I wouldn't have voted to close that question, I would have tried to edit it. I don't mind a good beginner question at all. A poorly asked question bugs me far worse then a question about basic networking. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of poorly asked questions are migrated when they should have been either edited or closed, or marked as a duplicate.

I think we need to try and think of a way to encourage people to edit or close bad questions instead of just transferring them somewhere else where they don't really belong.

It's a lot faster to vote-to-move than it is to take the time to fix a post. It's a hard one to incentivise.

@sysadmin1138, I agree, but I would prefer a vote to close over a vote to move if there is any doubt about the question being appropriate for the destination site. I am almost thinking that vote to move should cost 2-5 rep unless the person voting has more then 3k rep on the destination. That way if you want to move something you either must have established yourself on the destination site and you will probably know what does belong there or you must accept that your move vote will cost you a bit of your rep.

Answer 3

Now that we have some specific metas, it's indeed a good way to communicate between communities, especially on this kind of questions.

To be honest, I rarely see questions being dumped from SF to SU. I mean it happens, but most of the time it's justified: it's about a user-side question, and it's on topic. There is more often a problem with SO migrating off-topic questions just because they are not programming related, but I think we equally share the issue.

About the particular case you mention, I don't think this is particularly off-topic on SU. The question is of poor quality, for sure, but it is a matter of computer science in general. Networking questions are on-topic on Super User, at least when it's about definitions like this. After, if someone is asking for more details about subnetworks, we will rather migrate it to SF, since it's more a topic sysadmins are likely to encounter.

Answer 4

This conversation and ones on SO-Meta are beginning to make me rethink what qualifies as vote-to-close versus vote-to-move in my head. I've lurked on SU for a while, and am beginning to get an idea as to what kinds of questions thrive there and which ones go to die. The Classful question Farseeker pointed to qualifies as Not-SU to me, and only barely Not-Close. I guess I have a lower bound on the minimum grasp of the fundamentals needed to do much on SF than others.

I think all three sites are suffering from beginner-fatigue on the part of the avid answerers. SU is perhaps the most forgiving of teh newb, which is why those questions get shoveled that direction.

Answer 5

I'm wondering how many of those closed questions arn't 4-1 or 5-0 to move to SU, but something more like 1-1-1-2 or 1-2-2 to move. Does anyone know if close votes are published in the Data dump or even the fact that it was closed at all?

Also, I think that Kara's idea of a Question Purgatory could be very workable as long as you don't rely on the mods.

Say something like if the question doesn't have a super-majority of close votes (4 or 5 for the same reason) then it gets sent to Question purgatory. It would be locked while there and then the 10kers have a final say type vote to close needing only 3 votes to finalize the move.

Also include a "Should not be closed" option that unlocks the question, and removes close votes.

Answer 6

Here's how I handle these types of questions:

• If the quality of English is awful, I will try to decipher and clarify, but I'm less tolerant to nonsense with these questions.
• If its an obvious homework question, vote to close
• If I cannot determine what is being asked, vote to close

Answer 7

I was about to ask a question on meta.superuser entitled "Is Super User a dumping ground for Server Fault?" And found that someone already asked "Is Super User a Stack Overflow Dumping Ground?"

So for now maybe I will just keep it here.... How extensive is this problem? Do we have any data?