Popular and large contemporary open-source projects now embrace a diverse set of documentation for communication channels. Examples include contribution guidelines (i.e., commit message guidelines, coding rules, submission guidelines), code of conduct (i.e., rules and behavior expectations), governance policies, and Q&A forum. In 2020, GitHub released Discussion to distinguish between communication and collaboration. However, it remains unclear how developers maintain these channels, how trivial it is, and whether deciding on conversion takes time. We conducted an empirical study on 259 NPM and 148 PyPI repositories, devising two taxonomies of reasons for converting discussions into issues and vice-versa. The most frequent conversion from a discussion to an issue is when developers request a contributor to clarify their idea into an issue (Reporting a Clarification Request -35.1% and 34.7%, respectively), while agreeing that having non actionable topic (QA, ideas, feature requests -55.0% and 42.0%, respectively}) is the most frequent reason of converting an issue into a discussion. Furthermore, we show that not all reasons for conversion are trivial (e.g., not a bug), and raising a conversion intent potentially takes time (i.e., a median of 15.2 and 35.1 hours, respectively, taken from issues to discussions). Our work contributes to complementing the GitHub guidelines and helping developers effectively utilize the Issue and Discussion communication channels to maintain their collaboration.

翻译：现代大型开源项目如今已采用多样化的沟通渠道文档体系，包括贡献指南（如提交信息规范、编码规则、提交准则）、行为准则（规则与行为期望）、治理政策及问答论坛。2020年，GitHub推出Discussion功能以区分沟通与协作。然而，开发者如何维护这些渠道、其琐碎程度如何、以及决定转换是否耗时仍不明确。我们对259个NPM仓库和148个PyPI仓库开展实证研究，构建了讨论转为议题及反向转换原因的双重分类体系。最常见的讨论转议题场景是开发者要求贡献者将想法明确为议题（需求澄清报告占比分别为35.1%和34.7%），而将议题转为讨论的最常见原因则涉及非可操作话题（问答、创意、功能请求分别占55.0%和42.0%）。此外，研究表明并非所有转换原因均属琐碎（如非缺陷类），且提出转换意图可能耗费时间（议题转讨论的中位时间分别为15.2小时和35.1小时）。本研究补充了GitHub的指导规范，有助于开发者有效利用议题与讨论沟通渠道维护协作。