Take a look at https://github.com/bitly/nsq/blob/master/nsqd/nsqd.go#L266.  When a new topic is created on `nsqd` it queries its configured `nsqlookupd` to pre-populate channel information so that messages wont be lost to channels that it otherwise may have lazily learned about.

That function under the hood calls https://github.com/bitly/nsq/blob/master/nsqd/lookup.go#L138 which uses the response from `nsqlookupd` from the `IDENTIFY` command (ie the JSON blob you're editing above).

This process happens on a best-effort basis (if requests fail `nsqd` happily continues without pre-populating channels).  This is probably why you wouldn't notice this in production... but I imagine these HTTP requests are indeed failing for you.

So yes, I do think we should add the flag to `nsqlookupd` as well and change the lines in this response as appropriate.

Thanks again, great work.