The https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-cards/296048 offers a simple and yet beautiful and usable way to render topics in main pages. However, there is room for improvement in the metadata it presents.
- It only shows Likes. Meanwhile, the also official https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-list-thumbnails/150602 shows very elegantly icons for Views, Likes, Replies, and the Last Activity is also rendered neatly together with these icons.
- It shows the publication's date instead of the last activity date, which is inconsistent with Discourse's default behavior and might cause confusion top users ("why is this topic at the top if it's so old?")
The solution could be simple UX-wise: render the metadata in Topic Cards just like it is being rendered in Topic List Thumbnails. Same code, if possible. More consistency, and theoretically less maintenance work.
See for comparison:
Topic Cards
See the publication date on the left and the on the right.
Topic List Thumbnails
Same topic. Double the data shown and yet it doesn't add clutter, and the date corresponds to the last activity, not the publication date, just like Discourse's default does.
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