Discussion Forum Structured Data for Google Search

[shawnb61]

A couple days ago, Google Search Console started telling me that my forum was missing Discussion Forum Structured Data...

General Structured Data guidelines:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/sd-policies?hl=en

Specifics for forums:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/discussion-forum?hl=en

It sounds like they want the page summarized in some JSON in the header - including things like replies/comments...   I have WAY too many questions about that, e.g., I have topics that have thousands of replies...  Where to draw the line?

On a positive side, it feels like this will enable the nice formatted presentation you see on some search results.

On the negative side, it's Google asking us to do their job for them....

Anyway, putting this out there for awareness & consideration. 

[Bugo]

The topic is interesting. Ideally, it would be best to add metadata to the theme's markup — this can be done during development in version 3.0. For version 2.1, it can be achieved using a mod. For example, the StructuredData plugin for Optimus generates JSON-LD markup for breadcrumbs and forum topics. Currently, it marks topics as articles ("@type": "Article"), but this can be easily adjusted.

[Sesquipedalian]

I think we can add this to the roadmap for 3.0 easily enough. We are planning to make changes to use properly semantic HTML anyway, so it should be trivial to add microdata attributes while we're at it.