Thanks for your reply – actually the forums index does show topics on initial setup. Here is a quick forum set up that I did in a few minutes to test and assigned the page template as forum index and it lists the topics below the forums.
Home Brewing
The issue isn’t a cache related issue but do you think it could be related to permalinks. For some reason when a topic is created and assigned to a forum it shows up in the widget area and in the specific forum but the forum index page isn’t recognizing it which makes sense bc when you click on the forum even though you see topics the notification at the top states the forum is empty.
Thanks!