Understanding triggers for clarification requests in community-based software help forums

Help-seekers on community-based software help forums often face difficulty in composing queries or troubleshooting requests that bring immediate resolution, forcing help givers to request clarification that delays diagnosis. We investigate the characteristics of a forum post that trigger these requests for clarification from help givers (e.g., missing information, unclear goals, non-standard terminology). We created a classification scheme based on such triggers and applied it to 1000 Q&A pairs from four popular consumer software help forums to understand the prevalence of these triggers across different applications. Even though the user interface for posting questions on the four forums that we studied was largely uniform, we found a large difference in the presence of these triggers across the forums. Our findings suggest that instead of trying to create universal automated tools and recommendations for improving question quality on software forums, we should take into account the unique characteristics of the software and its user community.