I'm a moderator on SO and have been coming across a fair amount of questions that really belong on Server Fault. Some of them are circa 2008. A lot of these are surfacing after being identified through reviews.
Does the Server Fault community want questions of this age, or would you rather that we just close them on SO and keep them there?
Jeff Atwood has raised some concerns in this regard, specifically relating to the long tail. Speaking as the high user in the netware tag, I can say that even 5 year old information can still be useful to someone stuck in something horribly legacy or working for a no-funding non-profit.
So if that question has an accepted answer, and sounds like it isn't something with laser like focus, migrate it over. I'm sure we'll look it over for fit.
If it has no answer? Questions from July 2009 occasionally get poked by Community but rarely get answers from anyone except reputation-starved brand new users (and even then they don't get up-votes). Age-bias at its worst here on SF. It'll get nuked shortly after it arrives. Best euthanize those where they started.
Given the highly dynamic nature of the industry and the gear we work with I'm personally inclined to think that any question over a year old should be killed off, rather than migrated. Let's face it, if the question was really a good one it probably would have attracted enough attention to have been migrated already.
Besides, many of the questions sent over from SO are either off-topic, not a real question (from our point of view) or need a LOT more information and detail to be of real value on SF. Bear in mind though that SF operates within a tighter set of requirements than SO or SU.
No answer or crappy quality -> Nuke
High quality or Q w/ AA -> Migrate
SO is already known for shoveling questions our way, we'll clean them up as they arrive as necessary.
If you aren't sure, pop into The Comms Room and ask, there's always someone in there with an opinion.
I think I'm comfortable with letting questions die in the manner John suggests for un-answered questions.
If a question has been abandoned by the asker then migrating it here when the first thing we're likely to say is "need more detail about x" (or for that matter "x is discontinued these days, are you still using it because Xr2 works differently now") then its probably not worth your time moving it rather than killing it.
If the question is answered then that is useful data of course, so is a different matter. No matter how old things are there's always legacy stuff to support here as well as in code and sometimes old info is also useful for research purposes. We don't want to be killing good info, obviously.
In that case I'm somewhere between neutral and pro on moving it; it belongs here but I wouldn't want to break someone's link or bookmark to their answer or to their problem.
I think I'm with 1138 on this one. Thinking back, really, it's the issues with dinosaur systems that I really NEED the most help with. And to the business, the fact that it's old and decrepit only means that it needs to be fixed more quickly - as it's obviously essential, or why else would it not have been thrown out years ago?
Yes, that was said somewhat tongue-in-cheek - but also with a violent shudder. Supporting - to put it diplomatically - legacy apps & hardware can be agonizing, and if the questions are going to exist on the Exchange at all, they may as well be in the proper forum.
Aside from all that, I think it makes sense to migrate things around as the lines between sites become more clear. A natural and healthy development of the system as a whole (very appealing to my OCD side).
