What is the purpose of migrating a question only to close it?

Question

I posted this question to stack overflow a few days ago. It gained multiple votes and had a lot of useful discussion, but for some reason was migrated to SF. After it was migrated comments stopped entirely and the question was closed for not being relevant.

It seems very counterproductive to move a question away from where it was getting attention and then close it for being off topic.

Is there any way the question can be migrated back to SO? It seems like a mistake was made in migrating it here.

Answer 1

Stack Overflow have a habit of migrating questions to other sites that they shouldn't. It's an inherent problem with having a site that permits any group of 5 users with migration rights to move a question (but a necessary problem; without it all the sites would just be a mess of questions that don't belong).

Steps are being taken to try and avoid these poor migrations. But one thing we generally don't do it migrate a question back to where it came from, because they have already indicated that they don't believe it fits their scope (as sysadmin1138 notes, the question is un-migrated from the source site, but stays closed so that it can be re-opened).

Your question fits a real grey area that falls between a few different sites. It could be suitable for Stack Overflow (but not really as it's about benchmarking, not programming). It could be suitable for Server Fault (but not really, as it's not within the sort of scope we deal with as defined by the [FAQ]). It could be suitable for Unix & Linux due to its POSIX nature, as it seems related to fairly low-level stuff, but I most of us are wary of migrating stuff there as we don't really know if it fits their scope or not.

Ultimately I'd actually suggest posting your question over on Unix & Linux and see how you go. On second thoughts, after re-reading the question, I'm not sure that's appropriate either...

Answer 2

You've run into a rejected migration. When this happens, a question gets migrated to the a and is then closed on the target site, it gets bounced back to the source site:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13327336/application-runs-faster-in-a-virtual-machine?noredirect=1

Where it shows a simple "Off Topic" close. If you have the rep for it, you can cast a Reopen vote, which will get it into the review queue and it may get opened back up again. In its current state it can still accept comments, though.

Answer 3

My concern was less for the topicality (I was willing to let this one slide, since it's somewhere in the gray area between Dev and Ops) and more for the extended discussion in comments.

When a question actually results in such an extended discussion, it generally means that the question was either missing critical details or was not clearly focused enough to begin with.

So my vote is for "not constructive". Obviously I was in the minority.

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or specific expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, see the FAQ for guidance.

P.S.: In your case, the problem seemed to be that how you were running the test program caused invalid results; strangely nobody seemed to have picked up on that. Were the question open, I would submit that as an answer.

Answer 4

Welcome to our world, where we get a constant stream of questions thrown over the fence by SO, with absolutely no consideration or concern over whether it's on topic or not at the destination site.

In the case of the question being discussed, it's clearly not a programming topic (although indirectly related to programming), so I can see why they didn't want it on SO. However, it's even less on topic for SF, so should not have been migrated. Quite simply, the question is not a good fit for any site I'm familiar. Please read the FAQ for any site you wish to participate in.

Answer 5

To answer your headline question the reason is that the two groups are independent. The people who voted to close on SO thought the question was a better fit for SF and we disagreed.

Some of the people voting to close your question on SO don't have accounts on SF and collectively they have <1k rep so obviously they have a good feel for what is topical here.

I'd be willing to bet that most of them didn't read much past the first sentence of your question either because you use server when you mean application and obviously all server related problems are for SF.

I have flagged your original question and asked that it is reviewed and reopened by an SO moderator.

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It looks like the SO mod that reviewed my flag agrees with the previous close voters

declined - I don't see how this wouldn't be too-localized or not-a-real-question (i.e., unanswerable from our end)