Using Software Engineering to side step the rules on Stack Overflow

Question

We've had a number of people posting coding questions here apparently to avoid one of the following rules on Stack Overflow:

• Question posting rate limit - you can only post 6 questions per day and 50 questions per month
• Low quality question bans - having lots of down-voted, closed and deleted questions means your IP is banned from posting questions.
• Suspensions.

This is not something we should be allowing. If someone can't post on Stack Overflow it must be for a fairly serious reason.

At first glance it's not always obvious that people are doing this and only becomes clear when you notice that their last four questions were migrated or they actually admit it in a post.

I think we have to assume good faith and that in the first instance people are posting code here by accident, but it would help if people could do a little double checking before voting to migrate to Stack Overflow. This can be (in order of simplicity):

• Check their profile to see if a lot of questions have [migrated] appended.
• Check their Stack Overflow profile to see if they are suspended.
• Check their Stack Overflow profile to see if they have posted a lot of questions.
• Check the list of questions for many low quality ones.

I know that this can take time and the simplest thing to do is vote to migrate, but it would really help the moderators here and on Stack Overflow if we can prevent this abuse of the system.

If you have any doubts about the question, just vote to close as off topic and flag the question for us to look at. We can do more checks and contact the Stack Overflow moderators to double check any suspicions we might have.

Answer 1

Just to bring up the extreme here:

When using Software Engineering, I don't want to care about Stack Overflow or how they do things - they are a separate community (that just happens to have a large number of shared users with this site). When wearing my Programmers hat, I just know that a site called Stack Overflow exists, they like questions about implementation details and other hands on development/implementation stuff, and if I see a question like this, I can suggest that it goes there to be answered by the experts in such things.

For some sites, there is insufficient information about what they expect or need from a question to understand first if a question is good and second what needs to be clarified in order to make it a good (or better) question. That's why I tend to vote off-topic and would vote to move even questions lacking detail - the experts could say that in order to answer, they need to know X, Y, and Z about the situation. If the asker chooses not to clarify, then they can deal with it, but at least it's in a place where the asker can get help.

So I'm just wondering if this isn't the whole "users vote to move" being a flawed concept, or perhaps even the whole migration system being a bad idea. It was fine when there were three sites and a Meta, and it was very clear exactly what questions go on what site, but that isn't the case anymore. As a user of a particular SE site, I don't want to be bothered with knowing how other SE sites work. If I use a given site, I know what that community expects (or at least, I should, since I'm a part of that community), but I don't know what that other community over there likes.

Either way, I think this needs to be kicked back to the SE team, with advice to reconsider an "accept this moved question" queue or the removal of user-driven moves entirely (perhaps letting users suggest sites from all Stack Exchange sites to migrate to and diamond mods actually approving the move).

Answer 2

I consider any post that begins with "Well I asked this over on Stack Overflow..." to be automatic close fodder. I don't care what the post is about, if it was off topic there but okay here, it should have been migrated, not reposted. I rarely see the Spam reason used. Should that be used for cases like this?