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Just wondering if there is a better way to deal / manage questions about moving WordPress or users having problems with WordPress after they moved it from Localhost to new location.

It seems to me that a few of us might have stock answers for this problem. So it made me think: wouldn't it be better to make this a wiki / FAQ type questions(s) / (or something else)?

I would add that these questions are already duplicates so in using a stock answer, we are just recycling the same content.

At the same time as @UserAbuser points out: it doesn't stop the question being asked. My thought on this is, it would be more helpful to point the user to the WPSE wiki page, rather than:

  1. continue to use our own stock answers (if we had a wiki we could all contribute to that)
  2. we just close the question as duplicate (which doesn't fix the users problem)
  3. we point the user to the Codex - Moving WordPress (which may leave the user feeling like we've given them the flick)

See also:

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  • Still won't stop the questions from being asked, that or any other for that matter, but there are probably a number of similar questions that also fall into the same category of needing such treatment. Question is, if you start adding things like this to the FAQ, where does it end? Also, do we then close vote questions and refer people to the FAQ for a defacto answer and what happens when its a Move WP question that falls outside the default response held in FAQ but where the question gets closed on the "general" assumption that the answer lay -> here but doesn't... thoughts?
    – Adam
    Oct 15, 2012 at 12:32
  • My thoughts are that you / brasafilo et Al have a stock answer for this sort of question. Hence, having a community wiki page makes sense here. It would mean that questions like this should be closed as Exact Duplicate
    – Damien
    Oct 15, 2012 at 13:09

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No, it doesn’t need a wiki or any other form of a central duplicate target.

Questions about moving WordPress vary in many different ways:

  • from-to: live server to live server, local to live and vice versa, combinations with multiple servers, including stage servers, Git/SVN/Mercury repositories.

  • tools: SSH, Git, FTP

  • affected data: attachments, database, permalinks, GUIDs, users

  • WordPress setups: multi-site (sub directory or subdomain), single-site, changing that during the move, one installation for multiple sites.

Various combinations of all these points are possible … and probably some points I forgot to mention.

All of these questions deserve their own post, they need different solutions and different skills.

If we’d create a single looooong post and close all other questions as duplicates we would send our askers to a page they’d have to scroll up and down to find the answer that might solve their issue. Or not. It is very likely that they had to ask us to reopen their first question because none of the answers did solve exactly their problem.

From Dr. Strangedupe: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Duplication

One thing I want to be clear about, though, is that duplication is not necessarily bad. Quite the contrary — some duplication is desirable. There’s often benefit to having multiple subtle variants of a question around, as people tend to ask and search using completely different words, and the better our coverage, the better odds people can find the answer they’re looking for. And isn’t that, really, the whole point of this exercise?

Dr. Strangelove

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