How to best motivate posters to migrate their question to another site?

Question

It often happens that people post a question that is not suitable for the site they posted it on, but should rather go to another Stack Exchange site. Sometimes this is made easy using some of the options in the vote to close menu. Sometimes that is not an option and you just have to write a comment telling posters to move their post. However, I've noticed that posters are just not moving their posts. Some recent posts where I've had this issue:

• Dilemma over authenticity of gcov generated code coverage percentage where unit test are not technically correct
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67905839/optimize-c-monte-carlo-simulation-with-long-dynamic-arrays

What is the best way to motivate posters to move their posts to a better site? For example, is there a good template for a comment to post? Could migration perhaps be made easier by providing the original poster with a one-click solution to migrate to another site?

Answer 1

Question which are on-topic on Code Review

What is the best way to motivate posters to move their posts to a better site?

"Better". A common pattern on Stack Overflow is closing a question because "the question would be better on Code Review". The recommendation is rarely good; most of the time the recommendation is absolutely terrible. But what the recommender normally hasn't noticed is the toxic situation the asker is now in.

Since most recommendations to Code Review are terrible, most attempts at migration will fail. As such the user is setting the asker up for a horrible experience on not just one, but two Stack Exchange sites. As such only suggest migration when the question is already off-topic.

Whilst you could argue Code Review is special and gets an abnormally large amount of bad migration suggestions, Software Engineering also gets a lot of terrible suggestions.

Please do not ever suggest a user migrate an on-topic question to another site.

Questions which are off-topic on Code Review

How to best motivate posters to migrate their question to another site?

I think you're asking the wrong question.

How can I get a question migrated to another site?

• Preferred: Sometimes, as you've noted, you are given the option to migrate in the close dialogue.

• Many times commenting can be a good way to suggest the user post on another site.

  However please explain how and why the question would be a good fit for the other site quoting a relevant meta or help center.

  Doing so can help the author, and moderators, see your rationale and verify if you're correct. Which is very important because most recommendations are terrible.

• Exceptional: If you believe strongly a question should be migrated, and you've exhausted all other options you can flag the post for moderator intervention. You can use the "in need of moderator intervention" option and provide us a clear message saying the question should be migrated.