Migrated question still showing in unanswered list?

Question

"Best Practices for labels and text in Android [#12947]" < This question was still appearing near the bottom of our Unanswered list*, despite the fact that it was migrated to Android Enthusiasts, and then subsequently deleted from that site. Ergo, when you click the link from our answered list, you get an Android Enthusiasts 404 page... that's a really bad user experience. (I'm also not really sure why it was deleted from that site -- seems like a valid question to me.)

More generally: do unanswered, migrated questions always appear in this list? They really shouldn't as they're no longer part of this site's content, and can't be answered here.

Secondarily: why would this question have been removed from Android Enthusiasts?

_{*Until Patrick deleted it after reading this question. :-)}

Answer 1

The argument from a UX angle against showing closed (and by implication, migrated) questions in the unanswered list is understandable, but I'm declining this.

Philosophically, I think hiding closed answers is the wrong thing because part of what we want to encourage is for users to help these kinds of questions; to edit them and put them in the reopen queue, and then when they're reopened, answer them. In fact, we even have badges to encourage this behavior. Taking closed questions out of the unanswered tab would seem to discourage something we want to encourage.

Also, as an aside, this is this kind of discussion really belongs on meta.SE rather than meta.ux.SE because it's a network-wide issue and if you have an idea that lots of people agree with, you'll get more traction there as well (the reverse is also true ;-)).

Answer 2

To answer the lesser one of your questions, the Android Enthusiasts faq states:

What kind of questions can I ask here?

Android Enthusiasts - Stack Exchange is for enthusiasts, power users, and regular people who use the Android operating system.

If your question generally covers...

• Using your Android device
• Using a particular app on your Android device
• Trying to solve an error or other issue in using your Android device
• then this is the right place to ask. Basically, what problem (with your Android device) > - are you trying to solve?

What about other Android-related questions?

Please note the following topics are expressly off-topic here:

• Developing/programming for Android (please ask these questions on Stack Overflow)

Judging from the title alone (Best Practices for labels and text in Android), I'd say it doesn't fit there.

Now migrating a question to another site, just to have it die over there is not a good thing, regardless of the bug you're describing. If it was that bad to justify deletion, it should have been deleted or closed here. So there are two things that possibly happened, that shouldn't have happened:

• The question was wrongly migrated, and it should have been closed or deleted here,
• The question was rightly migrated, and it was wrongly deleted there.

I think mods from both sites are better equipped to tell us exactly what went wrong, but generally the deletion of a migrated question at the target site is bad form.

As for:

More generally: do unanswered, migrated questions always appear in this list?

Yes. This is a peculiarity of the system, closed questions continue to exist, and migrated questions are technically closed questions. So for cases as the one you're describing, the only valid action is for a moderator to delete it by hand - as Patrick did.

They really shouldn't as they're no longer part of this site's content, and can't be answered here.

I agree with that. I don't really see it changing, though...