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Today, I noticed a question that was placed [on hold] (as the new pre-cursor to being closed), with as reason

put on hold as off-topic by Oded♦ 1 hour ago

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

"Questions about specific programming problems encountered while writing code are off-topic, but can be asked on Stack Overflow." – Oded

If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question or leave a comment.

Previously, such questions would be migrated to their target site (SO in this case) immediately after sufficient votes were cast.

But with the new close system in place, it seems that migrations also go through some probation period. Is that intentional, and how long is that period? A five day probation period, like for closing a question, before a question gets migrated to another site seems like an awfully long period, during which it is likely that the OP will re-ask the question on the other site, leading to needless duplications.

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Reset to default
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Questions that are actually migrated will be migrated immediately and will have:

  • "[migrated]" in their title
  • A link to the migrated question at the bottom of the question
  • take you to the question on the new site automatically if you don't have "?noredirect=1" in the url.

What you have here is a question that would have previously been closed as simply "off topic". The custom reason for programming questions was used which inserted what you see here.

What this means is that the question as well as being off topic for Programmers wasn't actually a good question for Stack Overflow either and would more than likely get closed there too - not something we really want. The OP should post an improved version of the question on Stack Overflow to get an answer.

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    Then the problem is that there is no indication at all in the close reason that a) the question needs to be re-formulated before it will receive favourable attention at the mentioned site, and b) that it will never be migrated automatically, even if it gets reformulated here.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Jun 27, 2013 at 11:57
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    And I must add that I find it utterly confusing that an off-topic close reason mentions another site, but does not trigger a migration to that site.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Jun 27, 2013 at 11:58
  • @BartvanIngenSchenau - You have a point there. We can tweak the close reasons so if you can think of better wording suggest it in a meta question and we'll see about getting it updated.
    – ChrisF Mod
    Jun 27, 2013 at 11:58
  • I put in a request to indicate that the current pre-defined off-topic reasons don't trigger a migration. That should be enough at the moment to trigger the close-voters to think about their intention. I don't want to muddle the discussion at meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/5992/…, but I don't think we should have a pre-defined "this should go to SO, but is not good enough for there", as I think those questions are better handled with a custom message.
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Jun 27, 2013 at 12:23
  • does this mean we should be flagging for migration currently?
    – jk.
    Jul 2, 2013 at 9:25

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