How are Project-Specific Forums Utilized? A Study of Participation, Content, and Sentiment in the Eclipse Ecosystem

Although many software development projects have moved their developer discussion forums to generic platforms such as Stack Overflow, Eclipse has been steadfast in hosting their self-supported community forums. While recent studies show forums to share similarities to generic communication channels, it is unknown how project-specific forums are utilized. In this paper, we analyze 832,058 forum threads and their linkages to four systems with 2,170 connected contributors to understand the participation, content and sentiment. Results show that Seniors are the most active participants to respond bug and non-bug-related threads in the forums (66.1% and 45.5%), and sentiment among developers are inconsistent with knowledge sharing. We recommend the users to identify appropriate topics and ask in a positive way when joining forums. For developers, preparing project-specific forums could be an option to bridge the communication between members. Furthermore, the results show the researchers that our study is just one example of how project-specific forums are utilized. The study shows potential for other project-specific forums, such as GitHub Discussions, as these forums play a role to cultivate the ecosystem.