Why was my TrueCrypt question merged into a different one?

Question

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/

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.