Answers
Answers was a legacy Salesforce feature that let community members post questions and receive replies, with the most useful answer escalating into Knowledge as an article.
Definition
Answers was a legacy Salesforce feature that let community members post questions and receive replies, with the most useful answer escalating into Knowledge as an article. It shipped under the Community Application label, ran on standard Salesforce objects (Question, Reply, Answer), and was the original Salesforce-built question-and-answer experience inside what is now Experience Cloud. Each Question record tracked its title, description, posting user, and category. Each Reply tracked the answering user, the body, and an Is Best Answer flag that promoted the chosen response to the top of the thread. The community manager could escalate any reply into a Knowledge article in one click.
Salesforce retired the Answers feature in Summer 18 (June 2018). New orgs cannot enable it. Existing orgs that still had data on the legacy objects were given a long sunset window to migrate to Chatter Questions, Cases, or the modern Q&A capability inside Experience Cloud built on the Question and Feed Item objects. Most contemporary Salesforce documentation now uses Answers to refer to the modern Chatter Q&A pattern, not the retired Community Application product. Older certification material, partner blogs, and AppExchange listings from the 2010s still treat Answers as a live feature; treat any such reference as historical.
What Answers was, what replaced it, and what to do with surviving data
The Question, Reply, and Best Answer model
The legacy Answers data model used three objects: Question (the original post), Reply (each response), and an implicit Best Answer designation set on the Reply record. Categories grouped Questions for browsing. Voting let members upvote or downvote replies, with the highest-voted reply often becoming the Best Answer. The model was simple and easy to report on, which is part of why it persisted for years before retirement.
Escalation to Knowledge
The signature feature of Answers was the one-click escalation from a Best Answer to a Knowledge article. The community manager opened the Reply, clicked Promote to Article, picked the article type, and Salesforce created a draft Knowledge article seeded with the reply body. The article moved through standard Knowledge approval and ultimately got published into the same Experience Cloud site or external search portal.
Why Salesforce retired the feature
Answers was built on the Community Application before Chatter existed. Chatter Questions launched in 2014 and used the Feed Item infrastructure. The two surfaces overlapped functionally. Maintaining both produced duplicate work for community managers and confused product positioning. Salesforce announced retirement in Spring 18 and disabled new enablement in Summer 18, keeping existing data accessible but discouraging new investment.
Chatter Questions, the immediate successor
Chatter Questions runs inside the Feed. A Question is a Feed Item with a Question Title field. Replies become Comments. Marking a comment as the Best Answer pins it to the top of the thread. Escalation paths now route through Case creation or Knowledge article authoring outside the question itself. The pattern carries forward into Experience Cloud and is the modern Q&A surface for member-driven help content.
Q&A in Experience Cloud Help Center templates
The Help Center template and the Customer Service template both include a Q&A component that lets members ask questions, see top contributors, and search for prior answers. The component sits on top of Chatter Questions and Knowledge. It is the closest modern equivalent to the user experience the legacy Answers feature provided, with much better moderation, search, and theming.
Surviving Answers data
Orgs that used the legacy Answers feature still have Question, Reply, and Vote data in their database. Reports built on those objects continue to work. New question creation through the legacy UI is disabled, but the data remains queryable. Migrations to Chatter Questions usually involve a one-time export of the legacy records and a re-import as Feed Items, with the Best Answer reply becoming a pinned comment.
Reporting on Q&A in modern orgs
Modern Q&A reports run against Feed Items filtered by TYPE=QuestionPost. Counts of unanswered questions, average time to best answer, and top contributors all flow from that report type. The reporting surface is narrower than the legacy Answers report types but covers the operational metrics that matter for community health.
Where the term appears today
The word Answers in current Salesforce documentation usually refers to the modern Chatter Questions surface inside Experience Cloud, not the retired Community Application feature. Older blogs, certification study guides, and AppExchange listings from before 2018 treat Answers as a live product. When debugging a stale article or implementation guide, check the publication date; anything pre-Summer 18 is likely describing a feature that no longer exists.
How to enable Q&A in a modern Experience Cloud site
Modern Q&A runs on Chatter Questions plus the Experience Cloud question component. Setup is short; the operational work is moderation and Knowledge article curation.
- Enable Chatter Questions
Setup, Chatter Settings, confirm Chatter Questions is on. The setting is enabled by default in modern orgs and exposes the Ask a Question UI in feeds.
- Drop the Question component on the site page
Experience Builder, edit the Help Center or Customer Service template page, drop in the Question component (or use the default if it is already on the page). Configure topics or categories.
- Configure moderation
Workspaces, Moderation. Set rules to flag profanity, spam links, or specific topics. Decide whether a moderator must approve every post or only flagged ones.
- Train MVPs and moderators to mark Best Answers
Community managers and high-reputation members can mark a comment as the Best Answer. The marked answer pins to the top of the thread and is what new visitors see first.
- Route best answers into Knowledge
Set up a workflow (often a Flow) that prompts a moderator to create a Knowledge article from a popular best answer. Knowledge then becomes searchable both inside and outside the community.
- Legacy Answers (the Community Application feature) cannot be enabled in new orgs. Documentation that references it is historical.
- Q&A data lives in Feed Items, not in a dedicated Question table. Reports must filter by TYPE=QuestionPost to see questions only.
- Best Answers do not automatically become Knowledge articles. Escalation is a manual or automated workflow, not a built-in click.
- Moderation rules need explicit configuration. Out-of-the-box settings filter spam links but not topic-specific content.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Salesforce Answers RetirementSalesforce Help
- Chatter Questions OverviewSalesforce Help
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Answers.
- Question Component in Experience CloudSalesforce Help
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. When was Answers retired?
Q2. What is the modern replacement for Answers functionality?
Q3. What could users do with answers in the Answers feature?
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