Alignment of schema.org markup between QA/solved + DFP/core

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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?

7 Likes
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Thanks for raising! We will make sure someone has a look over the next month at this.

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The above issues has been fixed via:

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Amazing @rrlevering do you feel we are at a good enough spot to close this request now?

Going to set a timer to close it in a few days.

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Thank you for the fixes. I think the markup is aligned enough (mostly from the author information) that we can do deduplication on our side now using some combination of author and timestamp. To let you know what I plan, I’m going to essentially merge the extra Question type into the DiscussionForumPosting and the Answer type into the Comment on our side.

It would be advisable to eventually figure out a way to do this on your side. Either integrate it directly into Discourse for native typing in the markup to pick between DFP or Question OR use node ids to append the extra type on the markup generated by the core forum platform (so that the OP will be co-typed Question +DiscussionForumPosting). It’s probably eventually going to be disallowed or at least marked invalid in reporting by our systems, but I understand some practical reasons why this is necessary currently as we’re figuring this space out.

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