Hello Tommy,

Looking forward to Google Discussion forum (DiscussionForumPosting) structured data in MLF.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/discussion-forum

This looks really interesting. I was a little put off by the first complete example, that embeds the JSON in the markup of a web page, but the technical guidelines reassured me with the statement, that one is encouraged to put the markup into an external structure (microdata or RDF) and the clarification "This prevents you from needing to duplicate large text blocks inside markup.".

Additionally the format is able to display the thread tree(s) once without the content of the posting and a second time with those contents. Looks flexible enough for the main page with the thread trees only, but also for displaying a thread in the threaded and flat view. That's how I like it.

Because it would be an addition to support an external service, it would have to be optional with an opt in. Because it would be an addition to support especially one external service, which is one of the biggest players in the search and ad market, there are a few more questions to be answered.

Is Google the only one, who utilises this data format?

I see that they developed the format but that does not mean, they are the only users of the format. I would be more interested if this would be a generally useable feature and not a service provider dependent one.

Are there possible privacy issues?

In the light of the EU legislation (GDPR) it is not only a decision of the forum operator to use or not to use a format to play the data out to an external service. The forum content is created by several people, does contain personal data (possibly real names, e-mail-addresses and so on) and MLF2-based forums can be public but also private (access only for registered users). So the answer to the initial question is generally yes and such a feature has to be implemented in a very responsible manner. This means taking into account the specific settings for access to the data.

Is there really a necessity for an additional data structure?

The data format may provide a threads content with a better machine readability than the HTML-structure of the forum pages. But the HTML-structure might also be good enough (as it is or with easy implementable advantages) what possibly makes the implementation effort for Googles data structure higher than desirable for a possibly to low outcome.

Tschö, Auge