Closed instead of migrated?

Question

This question was closed earlier today with a comment left on it by @YannisRizos advising:

Hello and welcome! Implementation questions are off topic, you should ask them on our sister site Stack Overflow, however please make sure you add your code in the question. Read our FAQ thoroughly to see what questions we welcome on Programmers.

Although the question itself is not that great, should we have tried to help the user rephrase their question and then flagged it for migration to SO instead of closing the question? The user is most likely going to ask the question as-is (if at all) on SO and probably receive similar down and close votes there.

From this question it's my understanding we have a migration path to SO, should we be using that rather than a normal close vote?

Answer 1

The first rule of migration is "don't migrate crap". If a question isn't already a good question, it doesn't get migrated. I've actually stepped in and closed questions for off-topic without a migration even as people were voting to migrate because the question was not suitable for migration and would have been closed on the target site anyway.

Yannis posted a comment saying what needs to be done - ask the question on Stack Overflow and include code. There are really four things that I can see happening - the user doesn't do anything and never gets an answer, they repost the identical question on Stack Overflow and they get their new question closed, they repost on Stack Overflow after adding code and get an answer, or they edit their post on Programmers to include code and it gets migrated.

I'm really not sure what other help we can provide, other than to ask on the appropriate site and include the relevant information (the code).