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Bait-and-switch Close “Options”

With the new close options recently implemented, when you click close on ELU, that takes you to a first-level menu of five different close options. From that first-level menu, if you select off-topic because..., that then leads you to a second-level menu with yet another five different possibilities, one of which reads:

◎ This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network

And selecting that option leads you now to a third-level menu that contains one and only one so-called “choice”:

◎ belongs on english.meta.stackexchange.com

A one-item third-level menu is not a choice. It’s a bug. Moreover, . . .

. . . that’s ridiculous!

At a bare minimum, it’s a UI error that takes you to a 3rd menu that doesn’t even offer you any alternatives. (“You can have any color car you’d like, so long as it’s black.” )

If we are only allowed one “choice”, then that should be promoted back up to the 2nd-level menu instead of luring us to a 3rd-level menu where we aren’t even allowed to choose between more than a single item.

But I propose more than just fixing that bug. I propose that non-moderators be allowed to nominate a site to migrate the question to, instead of making us use a flag for it. That would make this menu item actually useful again; right now it is not.

It wouldn’t actually do it without a moderator’s intervention, but it would be a whole heck of a lot better than pretending to offer us the option to say that it belongs on another site and then bait-and-switching us with a meta-only migration path. That isn’t a real “option” at all.

If the Power That Be won’t even give us the mere possibility of nominating a target SE site — not migrating, just nominating for migration — I beg you to please remove the now-bogus “belongs on another SE site” non-option fake-out job and replace it with “belongs on meta ELU”.

It’s the least you can do. But more can be done, and should.

Please.

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  • 2
    Presumably the Writers path will be reinstated when they get round to it. But it should not cause auto-migration, and a fill-in-the-blank destination would definitely be a good addition.
    – Andrew Leach Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2013 at 9:46
  • 3
    I have the option to enter any site. I guess this is a mod level tool? In which case (in the interim), you can flag the question to suggest which site you think it ought to be migrated to.
    – Kit Z. Fox Mod
    Commented Jun 29, 2013 at 17:08
  • 3
    +1, at the very least, we should facilitate migrating to ELL, that would make everyone's life much easier and speed up the removal of GR questions. If it is already in the top three migration destinations, it is mature enough for this.
    – terdon
    Commented Jul 6, 2013 at 17:44
  • Didn't realize that this was too old. I shouldn't have edited it.
    – NVZ Mod
    Commented Mar 17, 2017 at 7:16
  • 4
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because isn't it status completed'? We can now migrate questions to ELL.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Mar 17, 2017 at 12:59
  • @Mari-LouA My comment before yours says "I shouldn't have edited it." I think it's better to have some mod add a 'status completed' tag.
    – NVZ Mod
    Commented Mar 18, 2017 at 7:08
  • 1
    @Mari-LouA I've marked it status completed and cleared the close flags.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Mar 23, 2017 at 18:01

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I'm pretty sure the mechanism (which is what determines how many levels you need to wade through, for example) is Stackexchange-wide. Other sites doubtless have more than one migration option, so they need that extra level of nesting. Until we get the Writers option back (dunno why it's not there, I swear I saw it recently, after the big closure revamp), and/or until ELL is deemed mature enough to accept migration, we'll just have to deal.

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    If you look at our migration stats, the big-three sites for migration over the last three months are ELL, Writers, and Linguistics. I think we should be allowed to ask for things to be migrated to those three places.
    – tchrist Mod
    Commented Jun 30, 2013 at 17:12
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    @tchrist My guess is that they decided not to allow automatic migration to beta sites, which all three of those are.
    – Kit Z. Fox Mod
    Commented Jul 8, 2013 at 23:17
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    @KitFox, even without auto-migration, should it not be possible to notify moderators that the question belongs on a different site (especially ELL, which seems to be where about half of all newly asked questions belong)? As it is, there is no way to flag that at all—it is either auto-migration to Meta or nothing at all.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 25, 2013 at 18:52
  • @Janus You can flag the question and use the "needs moderator attention" reason. In the box provided, you can write which site you think it should be migrated to.
    – Kit Z. Fox Mod
    Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 11:44
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The members of the list of migration targets are chosen by the mods and members of ELU (in this case), and can change over time, which is why the the SE-wide mechanism is as it is. However, before anyone excitedly proposes to add Writers.SE (again), bear in mind that sites still in beta are not valid targets, presumably because their ambit is still under discussion.

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