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Migrated questions get rejected if they are closed on the target website, with the exception of duplications.

Earlier today I saw that a question was posted here and on MathOverflow simultaneously (with links), and that the MO question had 4 migration votes. I voted to close it there, and when it arrived here I used my dupe-hammer to close the migrated question as a duplicate.

I then proceeded to flag it for merging with the original post on this site, which indeed happened shortly after. But then I noticed that the migration was rejected, which makes no sense.

Is this somehow by design, or just an unnoticed bug?

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  • $\begingroup$ I was the moderator handling the merge request. My initial reaction was to delete the migrated version, which I did. That may or may not have triggered what you saw? Anyway, I then realized that you probably wanted to keep the useful looking comments under the migrated version. So I undeleted and merged. If there is a version still lingering in MO, it can IMHO now be safely deleted. If I caused this strange behavior unwittingly, I apologize. Live and learn. $\endgroup$
    – Jyrki Lahtonen
    Jul 16, 2017 at 10:44
  • $\begingroup$ @Jyrki: All's well that ends well. The MO mods came to the rescue and the thread is now deleted. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Jul 16, 2017 at 20:21

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The timelines of the posts confirm Jyrki's suggestion.

It is the deletion of the post, not merge of the post that triggered the rejection.

The rejection happened at 07:52:41 (the deletion) not at 07:54:31 (the merge)

https://mathoverflow.net/posts/275485/timeline

https://math.stackexchange.com/posts/2360227/timeline

This raises the question if it makes sense that a deletion of a post results in a rejection even if it was first closed as a dupe. "Philosophically" one can likely make a case for both. Technically, I feel there is a good reason to reject: the migration stub on the target site would otherwise link to a deleted post, which seems undesirable, and/or would necessitate special treatment to avoid it.

To sum it up, it is deletion that triggers rejection of a migration and I think this is by design.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks. It didn't occur to me to check the timeline and see it was deleted first. I agree that it's not a bad idea to have rejection upon deletion. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Jul 16, 2017 at 13:13

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