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I recently noticed a trend where low-quality off-topic questions are migrated away to a more appropriate site. These low-quality questions will then usually be closed on the destination site, causing the migration to be rejected. That usually leaves those questions dead in the water. Nobody wins.

There were various discussions about this on Meta SE:

So basically the consensus appears to be to not migrate crap. I think we should stick with that, both users and moderators. Vote to close bad questions. Do not vote to migrate until they are improved.

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    1/ The vast majority migrated away from Super User do not get rejected. 2/ we are not all experts on the target sites and able to judge crapness.
    – DavidPostill Mod
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 12:58
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    While we are not an expert on every topic, we should be able to tell if the question could be answered by an expert or if the question needs more work. I stopped trying to migrate to SO, for one simple reason, most programming questions that end up on SU are due to the user being question banned at SO (IME).
    – Ramhound
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 15:35
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    I’m with Ramhound. It doesn’t necessarily take an expert to see whether a question is sound. There are many indicators. // Destination site rules are also important and easy to check. Depending on the question, minimal complete code examples may be a de-facto requirement on SO. Some rules are probably the same on all sites, like requiring that questions demonstrate proper research.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 20:02

2 Answers 2

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We actually have statistics over the last 90 days for this overall. The table is as of 2023-02-08 at about 01:00 UTC.

Site Migrations Rejection percentage
Webapps 72 29%
Stack Overflow 67 44%
Android 34 8%
Ask Different 21 9%
Raspberry Pi 3 0%
DBA 3 0%
Serverfault 3 33%
Webmasters 2 0%
Wordpress 2 0%
Hardware Recommendations 2 0%
Retrocomputing 2 0%
Code Review 1 100%
Emacs 1 0%
Gaming 1 0%
Vi 1 0%
Sharepoint 1 0%
Software Recommendations 1 0%
Security 1 0%

In theory we could dig further but unfortunately, there's no 'better' canned statistics + quite a lot of questions are deleted on their target sites. That said, we migrate pretty sparingly all in all. Its generally a good thing to keep in mind, and migrating great things in the 'wrong' place is a noble goal, but it isn't exactly a huge problem.

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    Looks like we have some topics down better than others. I find a 44% rejection rate to Stack Overflow quite remarkable, though unfortunately not entirely surprising. A majority of migrated questions I see are utter trash.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Feb 8, 2023 at 19:49
  • @Ramhound Migration doesn't happen unless the votes for it are unanimous (or a diamond mod gets involved), so I'm not sure what you mean by "those rejections were likely split close votes". If you mean split close votes on the destination site (after the migration already occurred), then that's certainly possible, but any closure (whether split or not) will reject the migration (returning it to Super User), except for the question getting closed as a duplicate.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 9:22
  • These stats are not counting cases where the question doesn't get enough votes to migrate it. It only counts cases where a question that is migrated from SU gets closed on the destination site. This causes the migration to be rejected, sending the question back to SU.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Feb 21, 2023 at 9:23
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For those willing to help to reduce the rejection rates, here is a suggestion.

If the question is very brief, mention that the question doesn't look to be a good fit for SU and might closed or migrated. Ask the OP to search thoroughly using https://stackexchange.com and the respective documentation or help (most of the apps have a help menu easy to find) and share their findings and why them didn’t meet their needs as is suggested in How to ask good question from this site.

I.E. If the question is about recovering a Facebook account, they might try [facebook] recover account. This returns 88 results, 8 / 15 from the first page are from Web Applications. The Facebook help is https://www.facebook.com/help/.

P.S. Customer service questions are off-topic on Stack Exchange Sites.

On which Stack Exchange site can I ask customer service questions about product X or company Y?

Here is one recent example that could had closed as suggested: How to connect a google spreadsheet with slack?

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