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I guess (I have no stats other than my experience) one of biggest reasons posts are closed as off topic (but there is another suitable SE site) is people asking for software!

We have https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/ as part of the SE, but this option isn't with our list of defaults.

The defaults currently are

meta.superuser.com
stackoverflow.com
serverfault.com
webapps.stackexchange.com
android.stackexchange.com

I know we can add our own reason why something should be off topic, but that is not as easy as clicking an already defined button with defined functionality!

Can this be added as an option? Or is there too much risk that most questions about software are actually too low quality?

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The recommendations sites are a bit of an odd bird. The sites handles things that are explicitly off topic elsewhere. In order to do that one of the aspects of the recommendations sites is the pretty exacting quality standards as laid out in the various meta posts on the subject.

As such a fairly disproportionate number of questions we'd tend to migrate might get simply bounced back, and having someone take a look before it gets migrated might be a good idea.

When I was an SR (pro tem) mod, I tended to consider these to be the criteria for migration

While for most sites its "don't migrate crap" on SR its "does it meet the quality standards for the site"

If not, can it be trivially fixed

And if so, (or even if not) will the OP take ownership of the question to make the changes. This often translates to the OP being the one who requests the migration, but I'd settle for knowing they'd come here, fix up their question, and actually select the correct answer.

So, from the perspective of an ex SR mod, not too fond of the idea. I've pinged undo to see what he thinks, but consider this a dissenting opinion, and we ought not to have SR as an auto migration target.

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  • As always, an interesting post with good clear thoughts. Thank you :). I have no idea if most/any voters really consider quality of a question which could be migrated. I would suspect they see a question about android phones, read no more of the post and just vote to migrate. I also can't help but feel that if it's part of the SE then it's part of SE and should be an option. If we need to know about the quality before migrating posts then I hadn't realised (although I always do use common sense). If I had voted on a post which is bounced back I would hope I get informed so I can learn!...
    – Dave
    Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 10:18
  • What Journeyman describes is one of the reasons I don't even attempt to migrate most software recommendation questions submitted at Superuser, because at the end of the day, the quality most of the time is extremely poor.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 15:47
  • To add, a lot of the questions I've seen I know would fall under the "crap" category in how they're written, and what's expected. I'd suggest at least cleaning up the question to meet their standard, then flagging a mod to move it
    – Canadian Luke
    Commented Mar 3, 2016 at 19:05

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