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I asked a perfectly reasonable question over on SuperUser.

It was then needlessly moved over here.

Windows Encrypted Virtual Hard Drive but not Bitlocker or Truecrypt?

It was then needlessly merged with a much more general question.

Before merging the question had one useful answer. After merging it has five answers, four of which are irrelevant.

I have two problems with this:

1) I would have rather my question stayed on superuser, which is a busier site.

2) You should allow questions that are not exact duplicates to exist. I refer you to the wise words of Jeff Atwood.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/

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I partly agree with you on the merits, but please keep the inflammatory tone out. A moderation decision that you disagree with is not the same thing as “over-moderating”. Criticism is welcome but please keep it constructive.

The migration of your question from Super User is something that you need to take up on Super User meta, this community has nothing to do with it. Super User generally rejects recommendation questions (which is the primary reason why the Software Recommendation site exists in the first place), so your question was by no means “perfectly reasonable” there. Rather than being closed in place, your question was migrated here where it is on-topic.

The fact that Super User is busier is no reason to ask off-topic questions there. In addition, attention isn't the same thing as positive attention; Software Recommendations has a quality policy which increases the chance that the answers that you'll get will be good.

On the duplication, I had already voiced my disagreement. Your question is about Windows and gives a special mention to Bitlocker, and doesn't care about Linux support. The question it was merged into specifically targets people who use both Windows and Linux. These are important differences. It's not just about Jeff Atwood's words (which aren't always wise), but also a general policy of this site — we don't close questions for being vaguely related, we close them for being actual duplicates (meaning that any reasonable answer to one would be a reasonable answer to the other).

Unfortunately, merging questions is hard to undo. However, in answer to your question, I would refer you to what I wrote here and elsewhere: use your system's native encryption software. You're already trusting the vendor of the operating system anyway. If you don't trust Microsoft, it's not just Bitlocker that you need to stop using, it's Windows. Using a third-party product only increases the number of people you need to trust.

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  • 1) I don't think over-moderation is an inflammatory term - it just means moderating things that don't need it. Its a common complaint about the whole StackExchange network. Its rather ironic that you moderated the title of this question.
    – codeulike
    May 30, 2014 at 17:13
  • 2) OK so SuperUser doesn't officially allow software recomendations-but most of the most useful things I've found on SuperUser over the years have been precisely about that. I think splitting Software Recommendations into a separate community is problematic because a 'Software Recommendation' is a type of answer, not a type of question. That is, often questions are 'how can I acheive X?' and the answer might be 'install Y' or it might be 'go here and change this registry setting'. In short: I'd rather keep using SuperUser for software recommendations, but I recognise thats beyong your control.
    – codeulike
    May 30, 2014 at 17:16
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    @codeulike If you want unmoderated, try Yahoo Answers. You can't have quality answers without moderation: improving or deemphasising bad answers is moderation. Software recommendations failed on SU largely because they weren't being moderated and so were a hotbed of bad questions with useless answers. I personally agree that the best outcome for this site would be to merge into SU (and SO), but our stringent moderation policies (this site is a lot stricter on quality than most SE sites including SU) would have to remain. May 30, 2014 at 19:18
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I'm entirely responsible for both the move and the merge.

I expected that it would be closed on such and figured sr would be a better place. We then had a more broadly scoped question of roughly equivalent quality and that was getting closed as a dupe. It seemed like a better idea to merge them.

I was looking a saving a single interest in question then, I was looking at retaining a question with 3 quality answers with a broader scope over one with a single answer.

Its an unusual situation and I'll keep it in mind when I consider migrating questions.

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    Why did you merge the questions? They are not duplicates! They don't even target the same operating system, and on this topic, it matters a lot. Now we have irrelevant answers to both questions (Windows-only answers on slm's question, Linux meanderings on codeulike's question). Unfortunately, we can't unmerge — merging is only for genuine exact duplicates, such as dual posts. May 30, 2014 at 16:42

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