Hey there Discourse team,
I am totally new here and I love what you have done so far. I noticed that when someone replies to a thread created in Discourse forums that answer is marked as an Article with microdata.
This comes up as invalid at Google’s Testing Tool since it is missing a few markups such as “headline”, “image” and “publisher” which are required when Article is being used.
Is that something that was discussed previously? If yes please feel free to delete my Topic.
Can you post the markup you are referring to please?
Hey there @codinghorror, thanks for the reply.
If you test this threads link in
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool
it will give you the invalid markup.
I am attaching an image bellow
Hope that helps 
If it is not an article what should it be? Which type is correct there?
Schema.org (the vocabulary) doesn’t require any properties.
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool is not a Schema.org validator. The tool primarily tests if your use of Schema.org conforms to Google’s own requirements for showing one of their Rich Snippets (or similar features/products).
For more details html - schema.org microdata - image required for Article - Stack Overflow. But still we can try to fulfill Google’s requirements.
I am not sure. But there are some options like below
OK, if you wish to take that please do. A PR is welcome. Can be included in your other paid work as well 
Yes I can do 
Now I am going to replace Article schema type with DiscussionForumPosting for all posts (both topic’s first post and replies).
But still Google may ask those required tags (like image, headline, publisher).
Hey there @vinothkannans thats true, schema itself does not require anything more but I guess making it compatible with Google’s requirements as well is quite in the interest of all
My solution would be :
For the image give the image add the image url of the person posted the comment
For the headline keep the headline of the topic
For the publisher I am a bit confused.
All of these though are pretty hypothetical because if you change the article with DiscussionForumPosting Google might not even require all these
Seems like they are still required:
Hello
I was advised against using Article type in a forum website
So I googled for some suitable schema type for [forums] and found about this one
DiscussionForumPosting
DiscussionForumPosting - Schema.org Type
Google tool recognize this type and required these properties as shown in the image above and listed below
- author: missing and required
- datePublished: missing and required
- headline: missing and required
- image: missing and required
- name: missing and required
- publisher: missing and required
For now I would just change the schema type as DiscussionForumPosting seems much more correct.
Couldn’t agree more.
Thanks guys that was an amazing fast response!
@tolkin reported to me that Google is still showing posts as invalid:
The image requirement is bizarre. It needs to be an image of the item (the post in this case), not an image contained in the post (which usually won’t exist) or from some metadata about the post. Google’s tool should be showing that as a warning if at all. I’ll add the headline attribute.
I cannot be sure, but it appears the only change that was made to the code was to change the schema type from Article to DiscussionForumPosting, which doesn’t solve the problem.
The change did not include the Google required attributes:
My screenshot is from Google’s tool. I added the heading today, but the image attr doesn’t make sense.
For what it’s worth, there are SEO advantages to getting this feature in place, based on this article:
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-schema/
Considering much of a forum’s success depends on organic traffic, this could be a real benefit to the software.
