An alternative approach:
Why don’t you put all of the Topics into their own Sub Category and share the link to the Sub Category, which will bring up a Topic List containing all of your Topics?
Then there is no need to create an ‘index’ Topic? The Topic List for the Sub-category IS your index?
Here’s an example here on Meta:
https://meta.discourse.org/c/plugin/extras/5
which will take you to:
which is a Topic List.
Like any Topic List it contains viewing stats.
Another useful alternative (if you can’t put them all in one sub-category and they are spread around) is to use tags.
Add a tag to each Topic and then link your users to that tag list, e.g.:
https://meta.discourse.org/tag/official
https://meta.discourse.org/tag/official
All of the topics here have tag ‘offiical’.
Again, it’s a Topic List with viewing stats …