Normally, we see reply, view, user, likes, and link count at the bottom of the original post, but occasionally this info won’t appear. While I assume that could mean no one has visited the topic, in this particular case, there are no replies, but I can see several links within the post have been clicked more than once, which leads me to believe that some users have viewed the topic.
Any ideas?
Could you illustrate this with a screenshot or two?
Certainly!
Normally, I see something like this at the bottom of every original post in a topic:
For the topic in question (and I’ve seen this on a few others), the info at the bottom of the original post doesn’t appear:
Ah, AFAIK that only slides into view below the original post once there has been participation in a topic.
Your screenshot where it’s missing has one hidden reply. Is it a flagged post?
1 reply:
0 replies:
Thanks!
No, the hidden post (on both screenshots) is just where I made the topic listed.
Does that mean users viewing the topic and clicking links doesn’t count as participation in the topic?
The element you’re talking about is the topic map.
It’s not really a topic if nobody responds, is it? The name seems pretty appropriate, a map with only one point isn’t much use 
Got it. Thanks for your help!
I understand your logic regarding what constitutes a topic, however, there’s still value in users visiting/reading content in a forum even if they don’t respond. For that reason, it’s helpful for us to see these metrics for every topic.
Is replying to the topic the only way to trigger the topic map? Are there any hacky ways I can make that happen for topics with no replies?
No, there must be at least one reply to see the topic map.
Dear @codinghorror, @Stephen and the whole Discourse team,
I see that Show topic-map without a reply is about the same feature request as outlined within this very topic. What we are asking for would be the inverse thing of Removing topic summary underneath first post. While a bit different, I see that you have adjusted this feature already through Topic-map-summary only shows the likes of the first post the other day.
Let me tell you about our story.
We have a reasonably popular topic at Developing Grafana Worldmap NG - Benutzerschnittstelle / User interface / API - Hiveeyes which has been our “workbench topic” for some time and a recently created sister topic at Grafana Map Panel - The workbench - Panodata Community which acts as a summary/wrap-up to the former one.
While we understand your comments from above, we think it would be very cool to be able to see the Topic Map/Summary widget also for topics not having any replies nor any other interaction with it as it happens to be for the latter topic referenced above.
I understand that metrics for “replies”, “users” and “likes” might just display as zero, but making the “views” metric visible for every visitor as well as the “Popular Links” section would be valuable to us.
So, I am humbly asking if you could consider displaying the Topic Map as an option, maybe toggled through a specific configuration setting, even when there are no replies to that topic whatsoever.
Thanks for listening, keep up the spirit and with kind regards,
Andreas.
