We have discussed it here and feel that a 4th custom close reason would be useful to have based on our statistics of recent migrations.
Can the SE staff please up our number of close reasons to 4?
This has been done other places in the past.
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It's been a few months and some users can now see close statistics, so I thought I'd revist this question. If you have at least 2k on this site (or are moderator), see how questions have been closed over the last 90 days. For the rest, here's a snapshot:
So the close reason for security policies is already a bit underused. Part of the reason might be that 14 questions were migrated to Security and at least 8 more were closed with write-in reasons that suggest the question would fit better on that site. Since only one of the migrations was rejected, it might be reasonable to make Security SE a migration path and free up a close reason slot.
At 5 recent migration, Stack Overflow is the next most common destination. However that's too few to justify setting that migration path in stone. By my count, it got 23 write-ins, so that seems a reasonable replacement for the security policies reason. Math was given as a close reason on just 9 questions in my analysis. Super User was mentioned in 5 close comments and Computer Science in one.
Don't forget that while regular users can't migrate question to sites not on one of the default paths, moderators can. If a question is a strong candidate for migration, consider raising a flag explaining what you think should happen.
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$\begingroup$ Is there any specific reason why there are so few possibilities for migration paths in general? If anything annoys me on SO and related sites is having to click off topic, migration and then not finding your site there, for whatever reason. SO is a very reasonable site to migrate to, and you don't need many confused posters to need the close reason again. $\endgroup$ – Maarten Bodewes♦ Jun 6 '15 at 13:16
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$\begingroup$ As an active close reviewer, my subjective impression is that 3% for the security policy close reason very low. Then you say that there were 14 migrations to Sec.SE; does that mean that 9+14 questions total were closed as belonging to Sec.SE altogether, or is there some overlap? $\endgroup$ – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jun 7 '15 at 11:22
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The first thing I'd suggest is looking to see if one of your existing reasons could be repurposed or generalized. As of this writing, this is the distribution of existing close reasons:
N reason
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250 Other (add a comment explaining what is wrong)
201 This question belongs on another site in the Stack Exchange network
133 Requests for **analyzing or deciphering a block of data** are off-topic here, as the results are rarely useful to anyone else.
92 Requests for **reference recommendations** are off-topic here. For details, see: [Do we want “literature recommendations” and similar “list/subjective questions”?](http://meta.crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1/do-we-want-literature-recommendations-and-similar-list-subjective-questions)
27 Questions on **mathematics** are off-topic unless they relate directly to cryptography. These questions can usually be asked on [Mathematics Stack Exchange](http://math.stackexchange.com/about).
Obviously, a lot of closes are hidden under "Other" and thanks to the free text nature of those comments there's no easy way to spot a pattern. I did find that 23 of the close comments contained the string 'overflow' and 29 contained the string 'security' (ignoring case). There are probably some variations (such as 'info') that also point to one or the other site. However, it seems like broadening the "mathematics" close reason to include other sites would provide more bang for the metaphorical buck.
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2$\begingroup$ We just recently removed the Mathematics one in favor of Security. We were hoping to add a 4th for StackOverflow and SuperUser (combined). Without the 4th, we would probably have to have a single close reason mentioning Security, StackOverflow and SuperUser. $\endgroup$ – mikeazo Feb 10 '15 at 20:43
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1$\begingroup$ I did a similar but more thorough analysis a while ago: meta.crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/354/… It's our conclusions there that led us to request a fourth reason. $\endgroup$ – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 14 '15 at 12:36
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$\begingroup$ Can we please have that fourth reason for programming questions? I keep missing it. $\endgroup$ – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Mar 9 '15 at 20:25
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