Follow, Chatter Answers
Follow, Chatter Answers was the subscribe action attached to a question inside Chatter Answers, the retired self-service Q&A community Salesforce built on the Customer Portal.
Definition
Follow, Chatter Answers was the subscribe action attached to a question inside Chatter Answers, the retired self-service Q&A community Salesforce built on the Customer Portal. Clicking it created an ordinary Chatter subscription pointed at a Question record instead of at a person or a business record.
Once subscribed, the follower saw new replies, best-answer selections, and case escalations in their feed and in Chatter email, on whatever notification schedule they had already picked.
The action is retired along with the feature that carried it. Salesforce replaced Chatter Answers with Chatter Questions, which runs on the standard Chatter feed. New orgs lost the ability to switch Chatter Answers on in Summer '16, and support ended with Spring '18.
In plain English
“Picture an old customer help forum. If someone asked a question you also had, you could press a button so the site told you when an answer arrived. Salesforce closed that forum years ago. The same button now sits on questions in the newer tool instead.”
Worked example
In 2016 a regional insurance carrier ran a Chatter Answers zone called Policyholder Help on its Customer Portal. A customer asked "Why did my premium change mid-term?" and eleven other portal users pressed Follow on that question. Each follow wrote an EntitySubscription row whose ParentId pointed at the Question record and whose SubscriberId was the portal user. When an agent replied and the asker set BestReplyId, all eleven saw the update in their feed and in Chatter email. When the carrier later moved to Experience Cloud and ran the Salesforce Q&A migration app, the questions came across but the subscriptions did not. All eleven followers had to press Follow again.
How a portal Q&A subscription turned into a plain Chatter follow
What Chatter Answers was
Chatter Answers shipped in Spring '12 as a public Q&A zone that stitched the older Answers feature and the Customer Portal into one experience. Questions were Question records, replies were Reply records. Follow sat on top of that, letting a visitor subscribe to a thread instead of checking back.
The subscription it actually wrote
Follow created an EntitySubscription row, the same object behind every Chatter follow. SubscriberId held the user, ParentId held the Question record, and NetworkId recorded the site when one was involved. Nothing in that mechanism was specific to Chatter Answers, which is why the idea outlived the feature.
Summer '16 cutoff, Spring '18 end of support
Salesforce's comparison of its Q&A features says Chatter Answers stopped being available in new orgs starting Summer '16, matching what Answers hit in Summer '13. Existing customers ran on until support ended with Spring '18. The retirement notice still warns that data may be lost if it is not migrated.
What you press instead
Chatter Questions, out since Winter '15, puts the Question action in the publisher and the answer thread in the standard feed. Follow there is the ordinary Chatter follow, counting against the 500 combined people, topics, and records a user may follow. Question-to-Case still escalates a stuck question.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Follow, Chatter Answers.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Follow, Chatter Answers.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He writes and edits salesforcedictionary.com, published by KineticBit Inc., to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
+5 pts / dayQ1. What replaced Chatter Answers, including its Follow action?
Q2. Clicking Follow on a Chatter Answers question created what, technically?
Q3. From which release could new Salesforce orgs no longer turn Chatter Answers on?
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