Hi there! I’m from Replit Ask, another Discourse forum. I made a Feature Request there, and they told me to put it here. I’m not 100% sure if this is the correct category to put this in, though.
The feature I want to request is the thumbnail of the post should contain the last message in that topic. This is helpful in trlling people what has been going on in that topic instead of manually entering the topic and scrolling through every post.
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If you switch the theme here on meta to “Air theme” and go on the “latest” page, would that be the kind of display you are imagining? This theme does show the beginning of the original post of each topic and not of the last one, tho.
Alternatively, you can use the search function, enter a date in the future in the advanced filters “posted before” (for example tomorrow) and sort the results by latest post. Does this give the results you would be searching for? Maybe the snippet of the post displayed is a bit short? 
https://meta.discourse.org/search?q=before%3A2023-12-31%20order%3Alatest
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Topic thumbnails are not the same as avatars. What you are describing @mevo is that the avatar of the last post shows. However, this question is about the thumbnails, like they are being shown on theme - Discourse Meta. Those thumbnails are automatically set to the first image of the first post of the topic. However, for some uses, it can be useful to set it to the image in the last post of the topic.
However if you look at this category then you will see that the thumbnail images are always taken from the last post of the topic instead of the first post. On that forum it is accomplished by a custom plugin which only works together with the journal plugin.
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Nowhere did I speak of avatars. Please read again.
My initial answer was to ask what OP exactly meant by “thumbnail”. Yes, it also made me think about a picture initially. I guess this first though might come from thumbnails of videos, especially what we’re used to with youtube. After doing a quick google search for “thumbnail”, it returned me this as second definition: “a very small or concise description, representation, or summary.”
I then wrote the above answer, which again, has not anything to do with avatars whatsoever (I did think about that too, but quickly understood it wasn’t what OP was after).
Now, we need his input to know what he was thinking about. I felt the post had to be readable, not only a pic difficult to actually read. I’m however not sure about that.
PS: What you linked here on meta show pics of themes, not of posts, doesn’t it? Or you just meant this as an example of what you think OP wants?
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hi @NateDhaliwal - i went to the Replit Ask forum and they have the same category and topic list views as Meta. i did not see any topic thumbnail type views. by thumbnail do you mean the topic list items on the right side of the category homepage? do you mean the user avatars? what exactly are you referring to by “thumbnail of the post”? use a screenshot if it’s easier.
if you simply mean the topic title list on the right side then those are not thumbnails, that is a topic list. they already go to the last unread post for the user which is the proper behavior (unless this is overriden in the individual category settings).
@not-ethan may also be able to help here 
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It seems to be what he wants, which he currently doesn’t have. Indeed.
Yes, but as I uderstand it, he wants something to show without having to enter each topic:
I personally assumed each item of that list might be a “thumbnail” of each topic and that could be what he meant. Or there is currently no “thumbnail”, which would be a description of the last post of the topic appearing directly in the list? Or is it something picture related like @RGJ understood? I’m not sure. As said in my first post, the way the Air Theme displays “latest” or the result of a search (link above) might be what he’s after. This seems the most probable to me. Hopefully we’ll get more info from him.
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You showed examples of where the avatar of the latest poster was showing.
You might want to search here on Meta instead and make yourself familiar with the meaning of ‘thumbnail’ in the context of Discourse. This is an existing concept and there is no need to speculate about what OP means, since that is perfectly clear.
Replit Ask doesn’t appear to use topic thumbnails. FWIW, my read of the OP would be that they want a topic excerpt of the latest post included in the topic list.
However, it would be very useful to hear from you @NateDhaliwal before we unnecessarily flood this topic with excessive speculation.
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You’re right JammyDodger, Thumbnail of topic should be title and last message - General - Replit Ask
I think think that the thumbnail of topics on Replit Ask should not only have the topic’s title, but the most recent message too.
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We recently delivered exactly this to a client but requires a plugin.
Replit is more than welcome to contact Pavilion to help them achieve this.
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Hey guys, thanks for you replies, but to clarify, I meant topic titles when you are in the home page.
The issue is that you cannot see the last post in the topic titles/list of posts.
A Thumbnail is an image. Do you mean text? An “excerpt”?
Perhaps you can provide an illustration of what you mean.
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These are Topic titles.
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This is a site with Topic List Previews installed.
The top part of each Tile is a Thumbnail, the bottom part is an excerpt.
In this case the excerpt is from the OP.
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Hmm… I can’t see to see it on my phone. Is this a desktop-only thing?
No, it works on mobile too. But only if your site has these customisations. It is up to the administrators of the specific site to deal with this.
Discourse is a flexible platform, you can choose to customise it how you see fit.
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Could you elaborate more on this?
Ask me a specific question and I can
You can do all kinds of things.
Here’s another customisation, including an excerpt from the OP and the Last Post:
(This is not publicly available and work for a client - but just to demonstrate what can be done already, if the administrators of your website initiate a project to build something).
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But you are in the topic, no? What about being on the main page? The topic titles don’t show the last post in that topic.