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As far as I currently understand it, there are no users other than mods who can vote to migrate a question. Why isn't this ability granted to at least higher rep users, or at least to give users the ability to flag a question (as opposed to voting on a question) for migration instead of them having to create a custom flag message? (This does not include voting to migrate to the site's own Meta site as this is already granted to higher rep uses.)

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  • I've asked this myself once (and asked this in chat as well), and honestly I've very rarely found an off-topic question worth migration. I think it's good as it is, if a question is really worth migration a mod can take care of it. Adding to Oli's answer: meta.askubuntu.com/questions/14184/…
    – kos
    Aug 22, 2015 at 10:03
  • Also, just to provide an example, consider all those C / PHP questions. Have you ever seen one worth migration? Honestly, I did not. If they would have been migrated, I'm sure they would have get into a spree of downvotes due to their trivialness. The good thing to do IMO is to quickly answer them in the comments and vote to close them, as they're usually addressable this way. Sometime I've just "regularily" answered them and voted to close them.
    – kos
    Aug 22, 2015 at 10:20
  • @kos: I think that if open migration was implemented then it would only be given to trusted users or something, so that only those very experienced could decide that something should be migrated somewhere else. And I am not saying that all of the questions should be migrated, just the good ones.
    – user364819
    Aug 22, 2015 at 11:34
  • The problem is more how many questions are actually worthwhile to be migrated rather than who should deem them as appropriate for migration. I might make a point about 20K+ users possibly not being experienced enough about stuff (C?) overwhelming Ubuntu to deem a question as worthwhile to be migrated, but leaving that aside, IME I've seen so few that I think that just a few trustworthy people as our mods should be entitled to migrate them. Remember that if one has a good enough expertise in some field he can always raise a flag to notify a mod about a question really worth migration
    – kos
    Aug 22, 2015 at 12:05

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My rationale to date for resisting open migrations is "because migrations are rubbish":

I maintain those stances. Essentially if we collectively do something wrong like closing or deleting a post, we can undo it. If we collectively shunt rubbish around, we waste that site's time too.

Perhaps more than anything, it takes almost no time to custom-flag:

This is a great question but off-topic, can we move it to Server Fault please?

Two seconds longer than selecting a site from a list? And the mods are more than happy to deal with issues like this when a migration would apply.

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  • But going by your logic, why don't we make it so that everything is flagged through a custom flag, instead of giving the user options, like what theyt want to flag it for?
    – user364819
    Aug 21, 2015 at 16:09
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    Huh? No, I'm not suggesting we should push everything through mod flags. Just the things that affect other sites.
    – Oli Mod
    Aug 21, 2015 at 16:14
  • Why do you discriminate against features which deal or have impacts on other sites?
    – user364819
    Aug 21, 2015 at 16:24
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    Because we are reasonable human beings.
    – RolandiXor
    Aug 21, 2015 at 21:28
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    @ParanoidPanda and because most users have little to no idea what the culture of another site is like, even high-rep, long-time users. People like terdon or Gilles, with experience of a variety of sites, for example, are rare. Therefore, people send questions to other sites which don't want them, and then waste the time of moderators there too.
    – muru
    Aug 22, 2015 at 1:36
  • @muru: Perhaps it should be made so though that the other sites have a migration queue of some sort, so that the mods can decide if they will accept a question to be migrated to their site.
    – user364819
    Aug 22, 2015 at 10:54

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