AFAICT from reading other posts, the schema.org markup for QAPage is generated from the discourse-solved plugin. I’ve read Wrong answerCount value from discourse-solved - #6 by sam for instance which has some discussion on problems conforming a more generic forum to the q-a model.
To consumers (including me/Google) this is somewhat duplicated markup with the DFP that is produced by the main forum. In fact, both of them are currently marked as the main entity of the page. Annoyingly they also don’t fully overlap in their contents which make some naive dedupings fail. For instance:
- the author of the Question/Answer markup uses the human readable name and no URL, but the author of the DFP uses the handle + URL. This makes the authors look very different.
- the content of the Question/Answer markup is truncated, but the content of the DFP because it’s microdata is fully there
- As discussed in the aforementioned post, answer count is sort of fabricated
- dateCreated is used in Question, but datePublished is used in DFP
The title and date seem to be consistent, but sometimes our deduping logic needs more when it’s implemented globally.
As a minimum improvement without major changes, do you think maybe you could align the author information so that both of them have handle, name (you can use alternateName - Schema.org Property to differentiate), and the profile URL in both places consistently?