How can I do this:
I want a short description to show in a category view under the title and I’m not sure how to do that.
Currently people see:
I’d like to prompt’s description to be viewable here so people could click +New Topic and respond.
AI-generated summary
The original poster, danielbauer, wants to show a short topic description in the category view under the title. However, as craigconstantine explained, Discourse does not include an “excerpt” feature for topics in a list by default.
An admin can edit a special “about” topic within each category to control the category’s blurb. There is a plugin available that can add this feature: https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-list-previews/101646. awesomerobot suggested that pinned topics can be used to show a description, but this description is automatically unpinned after the topic is read. Disabling the automatically unpin topics and default topics automatic unpin settings can prevent this behavior.
Admins (I am not an admin here) can edit a special “about” topic within each category. That controls the category’s little blurb that appears in places.
Discourse, I believe, does not include any sort of “excerpt” with each topic in a list. I’ve looked all through the admin settings (on one of my Discourse communities where I am an admin.) There’s even a plugin that does it: Topic List Previews (legacy) , so I’m pretty sure it’s simply how Discourse has decided to design the software.
If you want to dig (bearing in mind that we couldn’t change this behavior, one of the admins here would have to) I’d recommend heading to https://meta.discourse.org/
hahahahaha… I had two windows open, and I thought you were a member of another community that I’m in… I wrote this as if we are both NOT already here in Meta. I’m an idiot. 
No worries @craigconstantine. Thanks for the generous reply.
I have no idea on how to do some of this stuff and I really want the preview text so I’ll investigate the plug in.
I didn’t see it in settings too so I was wondering if I was missing something.
This topic is pinned:
This topic is unpinned (for you) because it’s been read:
We assume that if someone made it to the bottom of that topic they’ve seen it, so the description is no longer necessary on the topic list (and it becomes unpinned). You can disable this functionality by disabling the following settings (admin > settings):
automatically unpin topics
default topics automatic unpin