This has been superseded by parts of the Discourse New User Guide
Inspired by this answer by @jomaxro, this is a short explainer on the difference between topics and posts in Discourse.
Topics are collections of posts. Let’s use a random topic here on Meta as an example:
That topic has a title, “Don’t warn whisperers”, and ID, 199028
, and contains 5 posts at the time of writing this howto.
Posts are the individual “content” within a topic. This includes the “OP”, or original post, that is created at the same time as the topic.
As a point of note, a topic should always have 1 or more posts, in Discourse technical speak, this is called the posts count posts_count
. If a topic has more than 2 posts (that is posts_count
= 2) but no replies have been made to the topic, then that topic has “small posts”.
Small posts are topic activity notifications, things like topic closed
, topic opened
, topic pinned
, topic archived
, etc. See this image for an example: