Serious answer:
Q&A for professional system & network administrators
Not as serious, but gets the point across:
...not a dumping ground for SO questions
After reading more on the background of where this question came from, I don't think any amount of subtitle change is going to prevent bad questions from landing on SF. Using this bad question as an example (referenced in this meta question), a user on SO would identify this as something someone on SF would do, but not knowing how to do it themselves on SO, they throw it to us to help the poster out. We close it because it is missing a ton of critical info and is far too generic a question for us to answer.
How would we help the SO user identify this as a bad question? The short answer is we can't. Since they don't have the same knowledgebase as us, they will never be able to fully evaluate a question before migrating it to us. Since they don't know how to answer the question themselves, they know that somebody on SF would be able to do this general task, and they don't know exactly what info is missing from the question (in this case almost everything), they would kick it to us to work with the user and figure it out.
In a normal workplace setting this would work since we could talk directly to the user and figure out the missing info in a relatively short amount of time. In a SF format this does not work due to the fact that the amount of missing info far surpasses the amount of time/effort involved in extracting it from the user in the SF format of comment, response comment, edit question, repeat.
Possible resolutions:
- I have seen it mentioned and shot down that we should have a review queue on our side for final acceptance of questions that are to be migrated to us. Since that doesn't seem to be an option (presumably because it delays the poster from getting an answer even longer), what about a split vote for migrations where for a question to be migrated you need 2 users from the original site and 2 users from the receiving site for it to be migrated to the receiving site?
- This is kind of hard to describe, but is it possible for a question that SO wants to migrate to us be posted on our site with a slightly different look (like the question is italicized, has the SO site's logo on it, or says "pending migration") while keeping the original post on SO to see if it gets any attention on our site or not? If our users ignore it for a set amount of time or even vote it to be closed then the post gets removed from our site and stays on SO. If it does get attention on SF, then the migration gets completed to SF and closed on SO. This would allow the question to get more exposure in different sites without the punt and close process that seems to be happening now.
