Follow, Chatter Answers
Follow in Chatter Answers was the subscription action inside the retired Chatter Answers community feature.
Definition
Follow in Chatter Answers was the subscription action inside the retired Chatter Answers community feature. Users in a Chatter Answers community could follow a question, an answer, or a topic, and any new replies, comments, or status changes on that item would surface in their feed and email notifications. The action behaved like Chatter Follow but applied to the Q&A objects (Question, Reply, and the public-knowledge variants) that powered self-service support communities.
Salesforce retired Chatter Answers entirely. Existing customers were migrated to Customer Community (later rebranded Experience Cloud) and to the question-and-answer features inside Communities and Knowledge. Modern follows on community questions use the standard Chatter Follow plumbing on the FeedItem layer, not the legacy Chatter Answers tables. The Follow Chatter Answers term remains relevant for documentation of orgs that still have legacy Question and Reply data, for migration planning, and for cert exam history questions on retired products.
A retired feature that still shows up in legacy orgs
What Chatter Answers actually was
Chatter Answers combined three older products (Answers, Ideas, and the Salesforce Customer Portal) into a public Q&A community where customers asked questions, agents and other customers answered, and the best replies got marked as the resolution. The whole product was a Customer Portal layered on top of the Question and Reply standard objects, with a Chatter-style feed wrapping the conversation. Follow let users subscribe to any question or topic in that community.
How Follow worked inside Chatter Answers
Clicking Follow on a question created an EntitySubscription against the Question record, the same plumbing the regular Chatter Follow used. The user then got feed updates and notifications when new replies were posted, the question was escalated to a case, the moderator flagged a reply, or the asker marked an answer as best. The notification cadence respected the user's Chatter email settings just like any other follow.
Why Salesforce retired it
Chatter Answers was last enhanced in Spring 13 and Salesforce stopped letting new orgs enable it in Summer 14. The product was officially retired and replaced by Communities (Experience Cloud) plus the modern Question-Reply pattern that runs natively in a Lightning community. Orgs that already had Chatter Answers communities kept them running for several releases but were prompted to migrate every release thereafter.
Migration to Experience Cloud Q&A
The migration path converts legacy Question and Reply records into FeedItem and Question feed entries inside a modern Communities site, and recreates the follow relationships via the standard EntitySubscription table. Migration was a one-way operation; Chatter Answers cannot be re-enabled after the new community is live. Salesforce provided a Migration Tool through the Help portal during the transition years.
What replaced the Follow action
In modern Experience Cloud Q&A, Follow is the same Chatter primitive applied to the Question record in the FeedItem layer. The UI shows a Follow button on each question; clicking it creates an EntitySubscription. Users get the same kind of notifications they used to get in Chatter Answers, but the underlying data model is unified across all Chatter follows.
Legacy data and reporting
Orgs that ran Chatter Answers still have rows in the Question and Reply standard objects. The data is queryable with SOQL but invisible in the modern UI. Admins running historical support reporting (volume, resolution time, agent attribution) join Question, Reply, and Case using the deflected-from relationships that Chatter Answers wrote at the time. New work always lives in FeedItem and the modern Question-Reply model.
Cert exam relevance
Service Cloud Consultant and older Community Cloud Consultant study guides still list Chatter Answers as background context for how Service Cloud customer communities evolved. Knowing that Chatter Answers existed, what it merged together, and that it was retired in favor of Communities-with-Knowledge is enough for any exam mention. Modern study guides have removed deep-dive questions on the product itself.
Inspect legacy Chatter Answers follows in an old org
If you inherit an org that still has Chatter Answers data, the follows live in EntitySubscription pointed at Question records. Here is how to audit them without breaking the legacy community.
- Confirm Chatter Answers is enabled
Setup, Chatter Answers Settings shows whether the feature is on. If the node is missing, the org never enabled it and there is nothing to audit.
- Query EntitySubscription for Question parents
Run SELECT Id, SubscriberId, ParentId, CreatedDate FROM EntitySubscription WHERE Parent.Type = 'Question'. The result lists every legacy follow.
- Identify orphaned follows
Join the result back to Question to see whether the parent record still exists and the asker is still active. Inactive-user follows are safe to delete.
- Plan migration to Experience Cloud
Before retiring the legacy community, export Question, Reply, and follow records, then load them into the replacement Experience Cloud site using the standard Question and FeedItem objects.
- Delete or migrate follows last
Hard-delete legacy EntitySubscription rows only after migration is verified. Keeping them lets users continue receiving notifications from the legacy feed during the cutover.
- Chatter Answers cannot be re-enabled in a new org. If the Setup node is missing, the answer is to use Experience Cloud Q&A instead.
- Legacy Question and Reply records do not migrate automatically to FeedItem; the conversion requires a planned data migration project.
- Follow notifications respect the user's Chatter email cadence settings, which means a stale follow can quietly send daily digests for years if the user never unfollows.
- Deleting EntitySubscription rows is irreversible. Always export first if there is any chance of historical reporting on subscriber counts.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Chatter Answers RetirementSalesforce Help
- Following in ChatterSalesforce Help
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Follow, Chatter Answers.
- EntitySubscription ObjectSalesforce Developers
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. How does Follow, Chatter Answers help support agents be more productive?
Q2. Which Salesforce Cloud includes Follow, Chatter Answers as a key feature?
Q3. What business function does Follow, Chatter Answers primarily support?
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