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I clicked Close here. I wanted to suggest English Language Learners as a better site for the question. I picked Off Topic because This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network.

Ignoring whether my judgment here was good or bad for this question, this is what I was then presented with:

Closing>Off-Topic>Migration

icon for meta.english.stackexchange.com belongs on meta.english.stackexchange.com discussion, support, and feature requests for this site

Where "icon for meta.english.stackexchange.com" is a large ampersand image, and "discussion, support, and feature requests for this site" is in a small, gray typeface.

Seems like a bug. Am I missing something? Shouldn't the usual dialog be presented, where you can suggest an alternative site?

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It's not a bug; this is by design. Beta sites aren't presented as targets, which puts both Writers and ELL out of the frame, at the moment. The alternative is to flag the question.

But actually, the majority of the questions that are flagged for migration to ELL or Writers are simply bad questions, and the SE mantra is not to migrate what's not good.

Well, their mantra is slightly cruder than that, but that's the idea. Most flags raised suggesting migration away from ELU are not acted upon.

Personally, I don't think either ELL or Writers should be offered as migration targets. It doesn't take much for a question to be wrongly migrated — Writers used to be an offered destination with many rejected migrations — and sorting out the mess can leave things looking worse than simple closure.

I suspect the answer is to fix the question so that it's actually a good question which is on-topic on ELU or ELL or Writers; and then either answer it (if it's on-topic on ELU) or flag for migration to the site for which you have re-written the question.

And apparently you can now get a badge for editing a question and then answering it within twelve hours, if it results in an upvote, so there's an additional incentive!

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  • Typically what is done in EL&U is to add a comment letting the OP know that s?he might want to post such questions on ELL. I usually do that, but this time I hit Close, thinking the question might just be better on ELL. I was surprised by the UI (which I still think is confusing). Why not just have that page show a summary of what you say in your answer: no migration to beta sites. But my question really is why you don't get any alternative-site choice. What if the post belongs on SO or SuperUser or some other non-beta site? The page I see offers no migration possibility, except to meta-EL&U.
    – Drew
    Sep 30, 2014 at 23:29
  • Unfortunately, the design is SE's. You might ask the real question about general migration paths on Meta.SE. I think -- unfortunately for mods -- that the answer will be that it is for moderators to fix such gross errors.
    – Andrew Leach Mod
    Sep 30, 2014 at 23:31
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    I sometimes explicitly mention "should have been asked on ELU" in the user-specified "Other" option under Off Topic closevote reasons. I'm not sure, but I suspect subsequent closevoters may always be able to endorse my "customised reason", but may be unable to initially enter such a reason themselves because they don't have enough rep. I also sometimes use the "flag for moderator attention" to suggest migrating, but I don't keep track of how often my suggestion is acted upon. Are you content that I should continue to do both of these things?
    – FumbleFingers
    Oct 1, 2014 at 13:47

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