Follow, Chatter Answers
Follow, Chatter Answers was the subscription action inside the retired Chatter Answers feature, a self-service Q&A community that Salesforce built on the Customer Portal.
Definition
Follow, Chatter Answers was the subscription action inside the retired Chatter Answers feature, a self-service Q&A community that Salesforce built on the Customer Portal. Following a question, reply, or topic created a subscription so that new replies, best-answer selections, escalations, and moderator actions surfaced in the user's Chatter feed and email. It behaved like a normal Chatter Follow, but it pointed at the Question and Reply objects that powered the public Q&A zone instead of records or people.
This term is retired. Salesforce replaced Chatter Answers with Chatter Questions, which runs natively inside Communities (now Experience Cloud) and uses the standard Chatter feed. Organizations created after Summer 2014 cannot enable Chatter Answers at all, and existing customers were guided to migrate their questions into a modern community using the Salesforce1 Q&A migration app. The Follow, Chatter Answers action no longer exists as a distinct feature, so the page is kept for migration planning, legacy data work, and exam history.
From Chatter Answers Follow to modern community Q&A
What Chatter Answers actually was
Chatter Answers was a public self-service support feature that let customers ask questions, get answers from peers and agents, and see the best reply marked as the resolution. Salesforce assembled it from three older pieces: the Answers community feature, Ideas-style voting, and the Salesforce Customer Portal that exposed it to external users. A Chatter-style feed wrapped the whole conversation so the experience felt like the rest of Chatter. The Q&A lived in a zone, the same container that organized Answers and Ideas, and each zone had its own focus and topics. Behind the screen, every question was a Question record and every reply was a Reply record, both standard objects. Customers could ask anonymously or as authenticated portal users, vote on helpful replies, and escalate an unresolved question to a Case so a support agent picked it up. Follow sat on top of all of this. A customer who cared about a question could subscribe to it and stay in the loop without checking back. That subscribe behavior is what the Follow, Chatter Answers action delivered, and it is the part this page documents.
How the Follow action worked
Clicking Follow on a question in a Chatter Answers zone created a subscription, the same primitive the regular Chatter Follow uses through the EntitySubscription object. EntitySubscription represents a user following a record, a user, or a topic, and it carries the subscriber, the parent record being followed, and (for community contexts) the network the subscription belongs to. Once subscribed, the follower received feed updates and notifications when a new reply was posted, when the asker or a moderator marked a reply as the best answer, when the question was escalated to a Case, or when a moderator flagged content. The notification cadence respected each user's Chatter email settings, so someone who batched their Chatter email daily got the Q&A updates on that same schedule. The Chatter Answers JavaScript API even exposed a subscribe method so a developer embedding the widget on a public site could wire the Follow control into a custom page. The point of the action was retention: a self-service visitor who follows a thread comes back when there is an answer, which lifts deflection and keeps the conversation visible.
Why Salesforce retired it
Salesforce retired Chatter Answers because it overlapped with newer, better-supported products and sat on the aging Customer Portal stack. Chatter Questions replaced it and ships with any subscription that includes Chatter, so question-and-answer became a native feed action rather than a separate community type to provision and maintain. Organizations created after Summer 2014 have the Question action enabled in the global publisher layout by default, and from that release new orgs could no longer turn Chatter Answers on. Existing Chatter Answers communities kept running through their subscription term, but Salesforce told customers to begin transitioning as soon as possible and warned that data could be lost if it was not migrated to Chatter Questions. The official guidance is direct: Chatter Questions has replaced Chatter Answers. Consolidating Q&A onto the standard Chatter feed meant one data model, one set of moderation tools, and one mobile experience instead of a portal-bound widget that needed its own Visualforce and JavaScript. For Salesforce, retiring the old feature reduced surface area; for customers, it pushed Q&A into Experience Cloud where it gets ongoing investment.
The migration path
Salesforce shipped a Salesforce1 Q&A migration app to move questions off Chatter Answers. The path depends on where the community lived. A portal-based Chatter Answers zone moves into a new community built on the Customer Service template, then the migration app carries the questions over. A zone already exposed through a community can stay in place, and the same app migrates the content when topics are used for organization. An internal-only zone can become user-profile questions or a small employee community. After migration, questions are recreated on the user profile of each original author and tagged with a topic, so the categorization survives even though the underlying objects change. The important caveat is that migration is the only way to preserve the data; questions left in Chatter Answers when the subscription ends are simply gone. Follows do not carry over automatically as a separate step, so plan for followers to lose their old subscriptions unless the new community re-establishes them. Treat the migration app run as a one-time event and validate the question and topic counts in the new community before retiring the old zone.
What replaced the Follow action
In Chatter Questions inside Experience Cloud, Follow is the same Chatter primitive applied to the question in the feed. A member asks a question by choosing Question from the publisher or the Question tab, can direct it to followers, a group, or specific people, and a Follow control on the resulting feed item lets others subscribe. That subscribe still writes an EntitySubscription row, exactly like following any record or person in Chatter. Moderators and the asker pick a best answer, which the UI then promotes so other members resolve the same issue quickly. Because it all rides on the standard feed, a follower gets question notifications through the normal Chatter notification and email settings, with no separate widget to configure. Question-to-Case can escalate an unresolved community question to a Case, preserving the escalation behavior Chatter Answers had. The net effect is that the Follow, Chatter Answers experience did not disappear; it moved onto a unified data model where a single Follow concept covers records, people, topics, and questions alike. New builds use this pattern, and there is no reason to recreate the legacy action.
Legacy data and reporting
Organizations that ran Chatter Answers still hold rows in the Question and Reply standard objects, plus activity rows such as ChatterAnswersActivity that tracked participation in the zone. That data is queryable with SOQL even after the feature is gone from the UI, which matters for historical support reporting. An admin reconstructing volume, resolution time, or agent attribution joins Question and Reply with the Case records that questions were escalated into, using the relationships Chatter Answers wrote at the time. Because the modern UI no longer surfaces these objects, this is report-builder and SOQL territory, not a clickable dashboard. Keep an export of the relevant rows before any cleanup, since once a community is migrated and legacy data is purged the export is the only record left. If you only need the analytics and not the records themselves, snapshot the counts you care about first. New Q&A always lands in FeedItem and FeedComment through Chatter Questions, so any go-forward reporting points at the feed objects rather than the retired Question and Reply tables. Treat the legacy rows as an archive to read, not a model to extend.
Where it still shows up: certification exams
Chatter Answers survives mainly as background on Salesforce certification exams that trace how Service Cloud customer communities evolved. Service Cloud Consultant and older Community Cloud study material may reference it as context for self-service support, but modern guides have dropped deep questions on the product. For exam purposes the useful facts are compact. Chatter Answers was a public Q&A community built on the Customer Portal that merged Answers, Ideas, and the portal into one experience. It was retired and replaced by Chatter Questions, which runs on the standard Chatter feed inside Communities, now Experience Cloud. Following a question was a normal Chatter subscription on the Question object, and best-answer selection plus Question-to-Case escalation are the behaviors that carried forward. Knowing that single arc, old portal-based Q&A becoming native feed Q&A, answers almost any historical reference you will see. Do not spend study time on the retired Visualforce components or JavaScript widget; that detail is no longer tested and is not part of any current design conversation.
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 runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
Q1. The Follow action inside the legacy Chatter Answers feature let a user subscribe to what exactly?
Q2. Which Salesforce cloud product family historically housed Chatter Answers and its Follow action?
Q3. After Chatter Answers was retired, where does the same Follow-a-thread concept live today?
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