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.