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I flagged this question On Linux, how do I fake an MX record for a domain? for moderator attention twice, so did other users. If "moderators" think that a SO question should be closed because it fits ServerFault more, which IMHO is closer to 50/50 for this question, then why they won't migrate it right away?

The reason why I didn't post it on SF in the first place was that, as I was told over there after asking a few "silly" questions, SF is more suited for professionals, not beginners.

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All of Stack Exchange sites are "more suited for professionals, not beginners" or to phrase it better, they focus on having content with high quality. It's not really about experience: beginner can post excellent question and programmer with 50 years experience can post horrible question. It's all about how much time you spend on asking in a correct way. –  Shadow Wizard Nov 20 '12 at 11:50
One person commented and suggested ServerFault as a more suitable site for your question. That's nice, but it doesn't necessarily mean that your question actually is more suitable for ServerFault. The comment was a helpful suggestion, nothing more. –  Yannis Nov 20 '12 at 12:26
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this, but questions have to pass a pretty high bar of quality to be migrated to another site. The first rule of migration is "don't migrate crap." You might also be interested in my answer here. –  Robert Harvey Nov 20 '12 at 16:20
@Yannis What's worse is that the user who made the suggestion has a single question with no upvotes on ServerFault. So it's not necessarily a good recommendation. –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 20 '12 at 16:39
@RobertHarvey I mentioned that here :P –  Alenanno Nov 21 '12 at 9:55

3 Answers 3

up vote 9 down vote accepted

I'm speaking as a mod here, in general, not about your question.

Usually us mods, we don't migrate right away because we ask the target site moderators if the question is ok.

While we know right away when a question is off topic (as we don't need to ask someone else), when it comes to migrate, we need to be sure the question is OK on the target site. Since we can't know every FAQ, we ask the mods on that site whether the question is OK.

If we receive the OK from the mods, then we migrate it.

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With the ability to reject migrations and no way to migrate things over 60 days old, there's no need to ask moderators from the target site to "bless" a migration. –  casperOne Nov 20 '12 at 13:29
@casperOne I was obviously talking about questions eligible for migration; I'm aware of the 60-days-old rule. Besides, it's common practice to ask, I don't see anything wrong with it. You know the golden rule of migration: Don't migrate crap! –  Alenanno Nov 20 '12 at 13:41
Of course, but the point is, there were too many requests (and some feel, still too many) requests between mods about migrations which is why these tools were put in place in the first place. There's nothing wrong if you migrate something in good faith, it smooths the workflow out for everyone. If a mod is consistently migrating the wrong thing though, that's a separate story. Also, if the mod wants to ask because they want to get a better idea of what is appropriate, then it's fine to have the dialog in that case. But if in good faith you believe it should be migrated, have at it. –  casperOne Nov 20 '12 at 13:43
@casperOne You're going off topic. My answer (and so the question) is not arguing whether asking is OK or not. The point I was making in the answer is that one of the reasons that explain migrations taking more time than closing is that we ask the other mods and wait and/or because we're not sure yet. –  Alenanno Nov 20 '12 at 13:45
And that's my point, everything is predicated on the the second line; it's what makes the process slow in the cases you're describing, and is unnecessary, given the tooling, IMO. –  casperOne Nov 20 '12 at 13:48
@casperOne I disagree with you on that. It's unnecessary if you're sure of what you're doing. I prefer asking, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Certainly, there is a difference between a big site like SO and a Beta site and that's probably why you have that opinion. –  Alenanno Nov 20 '12 at 13:54
Hence my statement "if you're doing it in good faith". If you're unsure of what you're doing, then that's not in good faith, and you should ask. However, if you're doing it in good faith, the tooling was put into place so we don't have to ask. Also, size of the site does not matter in terms of view on this, I don't feel this way because there's so many requests to migrate, the majority of stuff flagged on SO is for quality issues, not on topic issues. The handful (and sometimes it will be days between me migrating things) that come up aren't so overwhelming. –  casperOne Nov 20 '12 at 13:58
@casperOne "If you're unsure of what you're doing, then that's not in good faith, and you should ask." That's what I think, too. I can't understand what is it we disagree on... –  Alenanno Nov 20 '12 at 16:41
@Alenanno: I don't ask about migrations in the Teacher's Lounge anymore; it just doesn't scale. I don't migrate questions unless they are very good quality, off-topic on the source site and on-topic on the target site. What the community does with them after that is up to them. In practice, there are only a few target sites I need to be familiar with, and beta sites shouldn't generally receive migrated questions unless everyone knows what they are doing. –  Robert Harvey Nov 21 '12 at 15:16
@RobertHarvey I ask because I'm not sure it's on topic on the target site. With time I'll be more familiar with the sites I use more, I think. –  Alenanno Nov 21 '12 at 15:20

In addition to what the others have said here, you're also currently banned from asking new questions on Server Fault due to the poor reception of your existing questions there. The system actually blocks even moderators from migrating questions to sites where the asker is question-banned. I'd work on improving some of your questions there.

Still, I thought it was a useful question, and because it is about administration of an Ubuntu server, I sent it over to Ask Ubuntu. That migration was rejected there, so I apparently misjudged its fit on that site. Sorry, but it seems to be remaining closed here.

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Thanks anyways. And FYI my questions on SF weren't much worse than this one. If you ask me on which of the StackExchange sites the elitist users are most arrogant and hostile to newcomers, it would definitely be ServerFault. –  Desmond Hume Nov 20 '12 at 16:03
@Desmond I can't really see anything that I would categorize as "arrogance" or "hostility" on the three of your questions that are visible on SF? If that's all that happened, I put it to you you have a very thin skin –  Pëkka Nov 20 '12 at 16:27
@DesmondHume I don't see any arrogance or hostility either (can't see any deleted posts, if that happened). Unless you're complaining about the questions that got closed, one of which is off-topic and the other is a duplicate. I think both closures were justified. –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 20 '12 at 16:37
@NullUserExceptionอ_อ There was a legitimate, well-defined question that took many downvotes because I dared referring to a tutorial in it. I couldn't watch is suffering so I deleted it. From the comments on SF meta post on that Q, I learned that people on SF stop reading and downvote a question as soon as they see a mentioned tutorial. During the discussion, people would delete their unfairly bashing comments because they would actually read past the reference to the tutorial and see that they were wrong. –  Desmond Hume Nov 20 '12 at 16:47
@DesmondHume If you are referring to this question, it looks like it was a bad question in its original form and that's why it got the downvotes. –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 20 '12 at 16:51
"Your question as originally phrased was basically "$_TUTORIAL told me to do X in part 1, and Y in part 2, why'd it do that?", which is why it got stomped on -- the only way to reasonably answer this is for someone to take a few hours out of their day, set up a test environment, follow the tutorial, and report back to you. To expect us to slog through tutorials and find errors in them for free is a little unreasonable (frankly it's mind-numbing enough that I wouldn't do it if you were paying me)." –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 20 '12 at 16:51
@NullUserExceptionอ_อ Just no. –  Desmond Hume Nov 20 '12 at 16:52
@DesmondHume What does that mean? –  NullUserException อ_อ Nov 20 '12 at 16:54

The question was closed by the community, not the diamond moderators.

It also take 4 votes for a question to be migrated from Stack Overflow due to the high number of poor migrations in the past.

The diamond moderators might not even have seen your flags if the question got closed quite quickly - there are 100's of flags in their queue - as flags are cleared when the question is actually closed.

The question has no answers so there's nothing to be lost by just deleting it and reposting on Server Fault if you think it's a better fit over there.

You are also making a false distinction between "professional" and "beginner". They are not mutually exclusive. You can be a beginner and a professional. What Server Fault don't want are questions from amateurs (e.g. those running home servers).

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