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I don't have figures for this, just a perception based on my close-votes, usually with new users though not always.

We have no migration path to software recommendations, even for well-structured questions that may be a perfect fit over there.

I know if people actually read through the Help & linked Meta questions they could find it for themselves - let's just imagine for a second that some users may not do that.
(Please stifle your laughter, tyvm;)

So, rather than just close the myriad SWReqs, which is more likely to drive first-timers away… which imo far outweigh those for ServerFault, could we get one to replace the other?
I'm aware there's a limited number we can have, so I'm not asking for one in addition to the existing selection.

Current selection, for posterity…

enter image description here

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2 Answers 2

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As it stands the migration path is to get the user to ask a moderator to migrate it. If it was truly "good" then I wouldn't have a problem sending stuff their way now that the "beta" is gone.

As a 20k user I believe you have access to https://superuser.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats.

We can see that 16 questions were migrated to ServerFault. There have been no moderator-actioned migrations to Software Recommendations (there might have been 1 and it's not shown on that list) but typically the kind of questions we get are of pretty low quality and would immediately get closed. We'd prefer to apply the golden rule of question migrations in any case.

I'd support changing the migration target list if we can establish that there are a significant number of questions that meet their rather stringent question quality guidelines. I'm not sure what search terms could easily find and catalogue them though. It might be a thankless task to catalogue them.

Wordpress or Raspberry Pi might arguably be better targets than Software Recommendations if the stats are anything to go by, but they're not better by much, particularly if you take rejection ratios into account.

For those with less than 10k rep:

enter image description here

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  • Anecdotally, I only passed 20k about an hour ago;) - but I didn't know that existed, tyvm. I do agree on the 'golden rule' of course, but my 'final straw' prompt for this question was superuser.com/questions/1494883/… - not in itself an exceptional piece of work, but just one among many that with a little coaxing feels like it could have some validity.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 18:40
  • I'm not sure if it is 10k or 20k power, I think it might be 10k. Seems that way by superuser.com/help/privileges/moderator-tools. See while that question might have a stated goal it misses a lot of the detail that might make it a "good" question, though I might be biased against "gimme the software" questions in general. If that is indeed the relatively low bar that is acceptable at Software Recommendations then we may need to revisit.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 18:46
  • You are free to coax into being something great, but a great many questions with little detail are currently unanswered and downvoted over there. I don't think we'd be doing them much of a favour by sending more of the same.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 18:50
  • I suppose my enthusiasm for a new "get it out of here without closing it out of hand" tool would be tempered by the tumbleweed that I've known meet even the finest questions over there. Maybe pushing more questions there would prompt more answers. I couldn't honestly say if that would be a valid tactic. Personally, I've only ever asked 3 questions over there, 2 got upvotes but no answers.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 18:53
  • So I've migrated that one over, which now puts 1 question migrated that way in the last 90 days. I'll check how it's getting on in a couple of days to get a feel for how "acceptable" it is...
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 19:20
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I'm a former mod on Software recs... and I don't think its a great idea.

The quality standards there are pretty strict - so its possible that many questions, even when they are a software recommendation may need extra work to bring it up to standards.

Probably better that these questions either get flagged for migration or reasked there.

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  • What about hardware recs?
    – Burgi
    Commented Oct 25, 2019 at 19:55

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