The discussion revolves around an issue in Discourse where automatically closed posts are counted as replies, which can mislead users about actual engagement. sidt highlights that the message "This topic was automatically closed 45 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed." is counted as a reply, making it difficult to distinguish between real user replies and system-generated ones. Lilly suggests updating to a newer version and manually deleting these posts to correct the count, noting that a rake task could automate this. JammyDodger acknowledges the concern and reclassifies the issue as a UX matter for further consideration.
This was on Discourse 3.0.5
The following message is counted as a reply, which is not right.
"This topic was automatically closed 45 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed."
It makes tracking replies to a topic difficult in topic listing page, where "This topic has 1 reply" could mean 1 actual reply from a user or there was no reply to the topic and it was automatically closed after topic expiry period.
Cheers!
Hi @sidt 
welcome to Meta 
You should up date to the latest 3.2.0.beta1-dev or 3.1.0 Stable versions.
Those are the small posts and I usually just delete them manually. Deleting doesn’t unlock them and corrects the count. I am pretty sure you can run a rails rake task to delete them all. But back up first and be careful if you do it this way.
Hello and welcome @sidt
I think this is currently working as intended so can’t truly be classed as a Contribute > Bug. I’ve slipped it over to Contribute > UX for consideration. 