Occasionally we observe posts erroneously moved from one site to another. Unlike a standard question closing there's no option to undo this action for high-rep users. When a question is closed, rather than moved, it can be reopened through voting, but unless I'm a high-rep user on the destination site of a moved question, I can't do anything to remedy the problem.

So it seems like we should have a "recall" option, where after 5 votes to recall a moved question, it's returned to the original site. This enables users who have the rights to move a question to a different site to counter-act actions they perceive as ill-advised even when they're not high-rep users on the destination site.

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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Just flag these for moderator attention; far less work for everyone involved.

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ok, fair enough –  Mark Elliot Oct 1 '10 at 5:07
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I'd like to see reconsideration of this declined request. (I found this question while composing my own version of it.) As a user with close votes, I can review and reverse any other closing, but not migration. This seems asymmetrical at best, and perhaps even unbalanced: why should four* users have the ability to shove a question off a site without possibility of retraction, when five users can't even irrevocably close a question on-site?

I don't believe that "Just raise a flag" is good enough as an answer, since moderators frequently state that they prefer to see consensus before taking possibly disputable action. Raising a flag just pits a single user's opinion against five others'. The standard process of collecting five "reopen" votes seems like the ideal way to indicate the desired kind of consensus.

Related: Should it be possible to reopen migrated questions?
Allow diamond moderators to reverse question migrations?

Note especially Shog9's answer on the second, expressing the opinion that mods shouldn't unmigrate generally.

*number of votes required for migration

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I wonder if you might provide an example or two of questions this would be helpful for? I'm not sure it's a good idea to have questions yo-yoing like that. And from the perspective of the target site, questions being yanked back could be an unhelpful action at a distance behavior. If it really belongs on the original site, why not ask it again? If you want to provide an answer, why not go to the new home? –  Jon Ericson Mar 7 '12 at 18:30
@Jon: I admit that I've only stumbled across a few over the past year. The one that prompted me to look into this was math.stackexchange.com/q/114914 I certainly don't want to see migration wars either. Duplicating questions across sites is, as far as I know, not considered a good practice. I'm less concerned about answering and more with peer review (of the migrators), but on the flip side of your question: why should I have to go create a new account if I thought that the question was on topic in the first place? –  Josh Caswell Mar 7 '12 at 19:27
That question, at least, seems to belong on both sites. I don't know of any reason not to duplicate a question on two sites if they would have different answers. That migration would have been better handled by asking a near duplicate question on Math and bringing the answers back to SO in the form of Python code. Maybe the original question could be re-asked with a link back to the mathematical answer? I'm not sure I could put Bill Dubuque's algorithm into code without some help. –  Jon Ericson Mar 7 '12 at 20:16
Ah. In fact, I think this sort of question would be considered an "edge case" that ought to be allowed to live on both sites: meta.stackoverflow.com/q/4708/1438 –  Jon Ericson Mar 7 '12 at 20:19
@Jon: Thanks for that Meta link. I don't think I had seen that before. –  Josh Caswell Mar 7 '12 at 20:21
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