latest or whatever is running on xenforo.com at the time of post
I just noticed in our (Google) systems that we're not giving the best error feedback for a problem that we have with Xenforo markup with regards to deleted/removed users. Right now Xenforo is producing:
HTML:
itemid=""
in the Microdata markup when a user without a profile is found. This has the confusing effect of resolving the itemid to be empty string relative to the document URL which means it's the containing document URL. I think that's the correct interpretation or at least other implementations seem to do that as well. Anyway, that makes the guest author objects merge with the main post object which kinda jumbles things a bunch.
Anyway, if you could just leave off the itemid attribute when it's empty rather than put an empty string there, that would be more correct.
Thank you for looking into XenForo's markup and how its processed by Google. It's much appreciated. I have struggled with this issue for years. Especially when it comes to two situations:
The user exists, but profiles are not being publicly viewable (due to privacy) Therefore the link leads to an inaccessible profile page.i.e. it shows a login page and has http status code 403.
Those pages are interesting in that conceptually they are in between posts and software app markup. Posts don't generally have review semantics involved, but since they are actual users on the forum and the resource is modeled as a post I don't think it's against any policy we have to model the reviews as comments. But they also have the itemid problem that I mentioned here regardless.
We do use the profile link for URL discovery in the link tags in which a 403 page would be rejected at the crawl stage, but in the markup we also it for disambiguation because it tends to be more stable/unique than a handle across all forum systems that may or may not use unique identifiers. So even if we can't get to the link, there still might be value in including it in the markup (you don't need to actually make it clickable if you don't want).
We haven't released a recommendation yet on how to model deleted users (versus deleted content which we do mention) explicitly. That's on my list to figure out. But for now just having the name be "Deleted User 12312321" and not including a profile link is a fine idea.
