Is it possible to show, when listing latest topics with activity, showing also a hint of the reply that caused this activity? Similar to showing topic excerpts.
When checking latest topics, I would like to know why an old topic is showing up before clicking on it. It would save me some clicks.
Old topic but I’m also curious about this, maybe as a theme component?
My forum is an online extension of a physical group I’m a member of, with many of the other members being somewhat less experienced with websites and computers. I think it would be less confusing for them to be able to see more of the conversation of an active topic without having to click into it, otherwise they may think the topic is something they’ve already seen and will ignore it.
Welcome to Meta @gallery3540 
I think the data of the most recent post isn’t available on the topic list. That’s why this cannot easily be solved with a theme component. There is this plugin Highest-Post Excerpts in Topic List
You might also want to look into Summarize - Gists. Those short AI summaries also change as the discussion evolves.
It’s technically possible, no? One could send a fetch request for each topic to get the last reply, and display it as such.
In a development environment, sure, but in a real forum, I think it would significantly increase the load on the server. How many of the latest topics are loaded at once? I think it’s 30. Instead of one request for every 30 topics per user, you’d then need 31 requests. With 100 users, that adds up to 3,100 requests instead of 100, and if they scroll or look at another topic list like hot, each time there are way more requests than before.
Post Badges comes to my mind as an example for a component that had that problem too, and it only needed one request per post of a topic. Example with requests and a few posts later you see that a plugin was built to avoid this and finally in 2024 support for it in core was added so badge data is included.