Community perception of Programmers.SE, the StackOverflow landfill?

Question

I ran into this question on StackOverflow that was offtopic there, How can I obtain feedback from external developers?

By the time I saw it, it was less than 2 minutes old but already received 3 migration votes to Programmers which I found utterly astounding. I tried to write a quick comment telling people that it was offtopic for Programmers as well and I intended to flag a moderator for them to close the question on their side. Before I could even finish my one sentence comment it had already migrated over by non-moderator intervention.

Clearly anybody that took 5 minutes to read the Programmers FAQ would realize that this could be offtopic here as well and maybe wouldn't have been so quick to migrate the question. I would hope that the moderators on StackOverflow would know better than this, but then this isn't a moderator problem, these are users with reasonably high reputation on StackOverflow who are allowed to make close votes.

Do you feel that something can be done differently to prevent Programmers from getting dumped on with questions that are clearly not fit for our site? Here is one suggestion off the top of my head: Do not automatically migrate a question to the selected site unless the vote is unanimous or a moderator voted for migration. If the vote is for majority migration then automatically flag a moderator.

Let me know what you think or if you think I am 110% off the mark.

Answer 1

This has been a recurring problem since the site's inception: in reality, Programmers.SE was originally conceived to be the dumping ground for Stack Overflow, and even though that purpose was dropped a couple of weeks after the site went into private beta, old habits die hard.

In the past year, there have been a few things that have been done to combat the problem:

• Migrations used to only require a first-past-the-post method of resolving: for example, if 2 people voted to migrate to Programmers, 1 voted to close as off-topic, 1 voted as not-constructive, and 1 voted as too-localized, it'd be migrated. Now, migrations require 4 people to agree to the migration before it happens. Otherwise, it gets closed as off-topic.

• We Programmers mods, much to the annoyance of them I'm sure, have worked with/conditioned the Stack Overflow mods to not migrate anything to us without checking with us first. So, any mod-led migration from Stack Overflow was likely approved by us and you can blame us if the question's bad.

Of course, we can't prevent 4 people agreeing to use the migration path to us as their dumping ground, and our rejection rate from Stack Overflow hovers around 32%.

There have been a number of requests to remove us as the migration path, or to provide some mechanism to "approve" or "reject" migrations:

• Please stop using Programmers.SE as your toilet bowl
• A way to cut down on the inappropriate migrations
• Allow diamond moderators to reverse question migrations?
• Require migrated questions to be accepted by the destination site's moderators

But to date, only small changes to the requirements for community migration (like the 4-person agreement, and having tags in common on the destination site) have been made. I have heard rumors that SE is planning to tackle migrations in a big way this year, though.

So in lieu of some fundamental change in how migrations work, I think education and proactive moderation is the best strategy:

• If you have 10k+ rep on Stack Overflow, check the Review queue for questions getting "off topic; belongs on Programmers" votes. It only takes two people to short circuit a migration.

• Check Meta Stack Overflow often. Every once in a while, someone gets the idea that the best way to clean up Stack Overflow is to migrate everything in a tag (usually [career-development]) to Programmers: we've been able to put a stop to a couple of those projects by voicing our displeasure there and explaining what is and isn't on-topic here.

Answer 2

I just thought of something novel and decided to provide a competing answer to my own question.

What if we restricted the ability of an SO user to vote for migration to Programmers to only those that:

• Have an account on Programmers

• Have 300 reputation or more on Programmers?

This way the person voting for migration may be significantly more likely to be aware of the FAQ and better able to make that judgment call?

Answer 3

status-completed (somewhat)

We are no longer a migration target on Stack Overflow, and the difference is already showing, last time we rejected a Stack Overflow question was May 22. Of course we get a lot less migrations now than before, but the ones we get are definitely on topic and of good/high quality.

SOpedians can still suggest migrating to Programmers, either by flagging for moderation attention or through comments, and the latter is still a problem ("my question was closed on Stack Overflow, let's copy paste it verbatim on that other site the helpful commenter pointed me to"), but it's a far lesser problem.

Answer 4

Personally, I think that this continues to show something that I've said multiple times since the migration paths were set up: letting users vote to move a question is a bad idea. Having a migration path requires users to understand, in detail, what other communities are about and what types of questions they accept at present. There are people on Stack Overflow that don't know what we are about, and I'm sure some think of us as the dumping ground that we were a year and a half ago. Expecting people to keep up-to-date on communities that they aren't actively involved in of is a flawed concepts.

I've (and others, in various posts on MSO) said time and time again that users should only be able to vote as off-topic and say "this doesn't belong here" and somehow let moderators find and move questions to the appropriate sites (if they are actually good questions), either via push or pull. But so far, nothing has ever come from this.

In terms of this specific question, it's a rather vague question and doesn't show any explicit ties to software developers, but I don't think an exit interview question is always off-topic here. If we accept questions about interviews (presently 439 tagged, 345 open), there's no reason why we can't accept good questions about how to best gather relevant and useful information from software developers in an exit interview. I don't know what such a question would look like, as every exit interview I've done has only been done with HR and not a technical person, but I would presume that there might be some questions out there.