When is it appropriate to add a comment to a question indicating that it may be a better fit for another site on Stack Exchange?

I recently added a comment to a question indicating that it might be better suited to the superuser group and promptly got told off by two of the admins for doing so. I had also flagged it as such for moderator attention.

I just want to know if such a comment is a breach of etiquette and if not, what would be an appropriate/approved format if any?

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2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

This practice should be discouraged for a couple of reasons:

  1. If the question is on topic for the site on which it is posted, it should remain there and not pushed off onto another site. It is not relevant whether it might also be on topic for another site. As long as it is on topic for the site on which it is originally asked, that's sufficient. For more on this rationale, please see this recent blog post.

  2. Users who post these comments often encourage askers to re-post their question on the other site, which results in an exact duplicate if the original question is later migrated.

    Since we already have built-in support for the migration of questions to another site where they are a more appropriate fit, there is absolutely no reason to counsel askers to take steps to move the questions themselves.

  3. Most of the people who leave these comments do not understand the scope of the site they're suggesting. That's not a slight against these people—there are a lot of different communities that make up the Stack Exchange community, and someone cannot be reasonably expected to be experts in all of them. Moreover, just because you're an experienced user with lots of reputation on one site does not mean that you're knowledgeable about all the other sites.

    Unfortunately, if you leave a comment for a new user that suggests their question might fit better somewhere else, the new user will often trust your counsel and re-ask their question there. This just creates extra work for the trusted users and moderators on the other site.

    This concern is reflected in the fact that it takes a super-majority of 4 users to migrate a question to another site. If only 3 or fewer users agree on a migration target when voting to close, the question will not be migrated. Instead, it will simply be closed as off-topic.

If you think that a question would be a better fit on another site, you have two possible options:

  1. Vote to close the question as "off topic" and choose one of the unlocked migration paths displayed in the close dialog.

    If you don't have sufficient reputation to vote to close, then click the "flag" link, select the "does not belong here" flag reason, and then choose one of the unlocked migration paths.

  2. If you think that the question should be migrated to a site that has not been unlocked as one of the destination paths in the close dialog, you will need to flag the question for moderator attention and request that it be migrated. To do this, click the "flag" link, select the "other" option, and indicate which site you think the question should be migrated to and explain why you think the question would be a better fit there.

    Moderators are expected to consult with the moderators on the target site and verify that the question is acceptable there before deciding to migrate it.

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When is it appropriate to add a comment to a question indicating that it may be a better fit for another forum?

When it is a better fit and is mostly off-topic on the current SE site.

However - if the post is on-topic to the site and is likely to get an answer, it should remain there.

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