-3

One of the reasons mentioned on the voting-to-close dialog is like so:

Questions asking to recommend or find a book, tool, module, theme, distribution, tutorial, or other off-site resource are off-topic for Drupal Answers as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

For module, theme and distribution, these kinds of questions could be a perfect fit for the (fairly new) Software Recommendations site. As confirmed also by:

Some questions that could be migration candidates ( 1 ):

Some deleted questions (enough rep required to still view them), with a corresponding question on Software Recommendations already ( 2 ):

My feature request: please make Software Recommendations a possible migration target, for the kind of questions described above.

Remarks:

  • ( 1 ): These are all "old" questions which have at least 1 answer from a moderator.
  • ( 2 ): I had answered these questions before they were deleted, and reposted them on SR.SE after they got deleted on DA.SE. Since on SR.SE none of these questions were closed, or received any downvotes, it makes me believe that this manual migration of these questions have not been perceived on SR.SE as "migrating crap".
13
  • 1
    It would not be probably added, for the same reason we don't have a migration path to Stack Overflow.
    – apaderno Mod
    Feb 25, 2017 at 21:17
  • Can you identify some good questions that would be good migration candidates? The main problem with migrations is that a lot of off-topic questions tend to also be bad questions, and the philosophy is "don't migrate crap". TBH, I don't recall the last time I migrated something to another site precisely because of this.
    – mpdonadio Mod
    Feb 25, 2017 at 22:22
  • @mpd some sample questions added now. PS what are those "same reasons"?
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Feb 26, 2017 at 6:42
  • @Pierre.Vriens "same reasons" is just that if something is off-topic on site A, it's doesn't mean that it should automatically be migrated to site B if it is on-topic there. Only good questions should be migrated.
    – mpdonadio Mod
    Feb 26, 2017 at 17:29
  • 2
    @Pierre.Vriens I went through those questions. I would not consider any of those good questions; maybe not bad questions, but not quality questions worth migrating. It could be because of their age (one was 4 years old, and the rest were 5+ years old). Are there any examples of recent, good questions that you think meet the SR quality standards?
    – mpdonadio Mod
    Feb 26, 2017 at 23:12
  • @mpdonadio Please review my updated question ... I'd be interested in your additional feedback about the (2)-questions I added. Alse note the (1)-remark I added (just in case you didn't realize the selection criteria I had used, due to which you might want to rephrase your prior, and upvoted, comment ...).
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Feb 28, 2017 at 7:46
  • 1
    @Pierre it seems like you're missing quite a major point in this. You've based all your assumptions on you, a single person, having successfully copy-pasted a handful of questions from one site to another. In itself, that isn't enough justification to add an automated migration path for everyone on the site. The resolution to this might be that we simply say "feel free to flag for migration and mods will do it on a case-by-case basis"..we don't necessarily need the exact solution you've proposed to solve the problem. I still want these actions to be validated by someone who knows the network
    – Clive Mod
    Feb 28, 2017 at 7:52
  • 1
    Also a mod, or anyone for that matter, having answered a question 5 years ago, before this policy existed, isn't any sort of justification either. Still waiting to see this list of questions, or even a single one, that would be acceptable to SR based on their published criteria. Without that list I've gotta say it's likely nothing's going to happen here. If there's not a demonstrable problem, there's nothing to find a solution for. I'm not saying they couldn't be turned into acceptable questions for SR, just that they're currently not, so allowing them to be automatically migrated would be bad
    – Clive Mod
    Feb 28, 2017 at 7:55
  • @Clive interesting comments, merci for sharing. And if this feature request gets rejected: oh well, so be it.
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Feb 28, 2017 at 8:06
  • 1
    If it does it'll be for good reasons, but i don't want to try to preempt anything. Whatever happens this is a great idea in theory, it's just about whether we can make it work for everyone without causing carnage on the other site. The fact they're receptive to it is great, we just need to make sure the things we're planning to send them meet their expectations, and that they're happy mopping up on the odd occasion things might not go 100% smoothly
    – Clive Mod
    Feb 28, 2017 at 8:13
  • @Clive "this is a great idea" seems like the opposite of the first phrase in your own answer. Apart from that: "worse then not succeeding, is to not try".
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Feb 28, 2017 at 8:20
  • 1
    @Pierre.Vriens Make sure you're not putting words in people's mouths: I said great idea in theory. In practice I don't like it
    – Clive Mod
    Feb 28, 2017 at 8:44
  • 1
    Over the last 90 days, 112 questions have been closed under "recommend or find a book, tool, module, theme, distribution, tutorial, or other off-site resource" reason. This represents about 15% of the total closed questions over this time period.
    – mpdonadio Mod
    Mar 2, 2017 at 23:28

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
3

Software Recommendations moderator here.

Thanks for posting https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2669/do-you-want-a-migration-path-for-recommendation-questions-from-drupal-answers on our meta.

Apparently, our community likes the idea (9 votes for, 0 votes against, as of now).

So, let's try that as an experiment.

Our rules are extremely strict, but never know, let's check the statistics in a week or month.

2
  • 2
    Merci Nicolas ... finally a place in the SE universe where questions like "Is there a (recommended) module for it?" can be MOVED to (instead of closing / deleting then here on DA.SE) ...
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Dec 7, 2018 at 11:42
  • please make something happen ...
    – Pierre.Vriens
    Oct 14, 2019 at 16:14
3

I don't like the idea personally. As already mentioned in the comments, migration is extremely rare and I don't think we need to increase the surface area for it. Even mods basically never migrate questions, it's very rarely a useful thing to do.

If people still manage to post off topic recommendation questions that you think can be answered elsewhere, just comment and tell them the other place exists, even link them to their on topic help page for reference.

That will encourage them to actually read what is or isn't on topic at the other site, and give them the chance to re-ask the question while properly tailoring it to its new home. Even if the question is technically perfect for the other site, validating it is a good thing.

This will stop unwanted migration rejections when people here don't realise that target sites have their own rules and standards that differ to ours and simply chuck everything that looks vaguely like a recommendation at this poor other site.

All that aside, let's not ignore the biggest issue: whether these questions are actually appropriate for SR.

For example, none of the questions you've listed as examples come close to being on topic on at the moment. If you read through What is required for a question to contain "enough" information? it will be immediately clear why. None of the questions in your list have even a reasonable amount of the required information for a question there.

So to conclude, there's no compelling reason to let people migrate content from Drupal Answers to Software Recommendations at the moment. If you have some examples of better questions that wouldn't fall short of SR's quality guidelines, edit them into the question so they can be looked at too.

As an aside, I asked on SR's meta for their feedback on this. Before we can start any meaningful discussion about it, we need to know that they definitely want this path to exist, we wouldn't force it on them.

3

I am going to go on record and say this shouldn't be our decision. SR will be the ones left with what ends up there. We should let them decide at https://softwarerecs.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2669 If they want the questions then we should make it happen. We already decided that we don't want the questions, but we shouldn't be the ones to say they don't have a proper home elsewhere on SE.

1
  • 1
    This is right but needs an addendum: it's our responsibility to make sure we have a trustworthy community who will be migrating for he right reasons (i.e. Not simply a rep-hunting/power exercise as we see so often displayed here through other methods). That will also come into the decision, whether it be from our end or from the SR mods following a frank discussion about the potential danger they would be putting themselves in.
    – Clive Mod
    Mar 3, 2017 at 16:05
1

Instead of migrating them away, most of these questions could be made on-topic with a little bit of rephrasing. At best resulting in answers that both A) recommend modules to have a look at and B) explain how the problem could be solved programmatically.

Win-win.

We won't get B) when migrating them away. The real problem with such questions in my experience normally is that OP doesn't show minimal efforts made to solve the question on their own. Migrating them away is just outsourcing the underlying problem.

1
  • Yes, the minimal effort is a problem that isn't resolved by migrating the question. Chances are the other site has some requirements about which questions are accepted, and I find hard to believe they won't require a minimum effort.
    – apaderno Mod
    Dec 22, 2019 at 12:57

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .