Like, Chatter Answers
Like, Chatter Answers was the engagement action inside Chatter Answers, the now-retired Salesforce self-service Q&A community.
Definition
Like, Chatter Answers was the engagement action inside Chatter Answers, the now-retired Salesforce self-service Q&A community. Members could like a question or a reply to mark it as useful, the same way they liked posts elsewhere in the Chatter feed that wrapped the conversation. The like raised the visible like count, fed into how helpful content was surfaced, and worked alongside the asker choosing a Best Answer. It is a Service Cloud term that only describes a feature that no longer ships.
This action is retired. Salesforce ended Chatter Answers and pointed customers at Chatter Questions inside Communities, now called Experience Cloud. When a Chatter Answers community is migrated, vote records convert to FeedLike records, so the engagement signal carries forward as the standard Chatter Like on a FeedItem. The term still matters for reading older orgs that hold legacy Question and Reply data, for cert study guides that referenced it, and for partners scoping a migration off an old Chatter Answers site.
How liking worked in Chatter Answers, and where it went
Chatter Answers as the parent product
Chatter Answers was a self-service support community that combined a question-and-answer model with a Chatter feed. Customers posted a question, other members and agents replied, and the asker marked one reply as the answer that solved it. Internally the conversation ran on the Question and Reply standard objects, while a Chatter feed layer gave it the familiar like, comment, and follow actions. Companies used it to deflect cases by letting customers find existing answers before logging a new one. The feature sat in Service Cloud and tied into Salesforce Knowledge, Cases, and the old Customer Portal. Liking was one of the lighter-weight signals available to participants. You did not have to write a reply to take part, you could just like a question you also wanted answered or a reply you found helpful. That low-effort signal mattered for a support community, where most visitors read rather than write. The like count on a thread gave later visitors a quick read on which replies the crowd trusted, which is exactly the behavior modern Q&A still depends on.
What a like actually did to the data
When you liked an item in a Chatter Answers community, Salesforce recorded it the same way a like worked anywhere in Chatter. The like attached to the feed representation of the question or reply and incremented its visible count. Because the Chatter feed wrapped the underlying Question and Reply records, the engagement lived in the Chatter data model rather than as a separate Chatter Answers object. This is why the action migrates so cleanly. The official migration behavior is explicit: when a Chatter Answers community is moved to a modern community, question records convert to FeedItem records, reply records convert to FeedComment records, and vote records convert to FeedLike records. So the helpful signal a customer expressed years ago survives the move and shows up as a standard Chatter Like on the migrated FeedItem or FeedComment. Admins inheriting an old org can therefore reason about this data with the same FeedLike object they already know, instead of learning a retired, Chatter-Answers-specific structure that no longer has any UI behind it.
Why Salesforce retired it
Chatter Answers received little new investment after its early releases, and Salesforce had a stronger story in Communities and Chatter Questions. Salesforce announced the end of life and confirmed that Chatter Questions had replaced Chatter Answers. Support wound down across the Winter 18 and Spring 18 timeframe, after which the Chatter Answers community pages stopped functioning. The official guidance is blunt about the stakes: data may be lost if it is not migrated to Chatter Questions before the feature goes away. Customers on subscriptions that included Chatter could keep using Chatter Answers until their subscription term ended, but no new orgs could turn it on and there was no roadmap for it. The motivation was consolidation. Rather than maintain a separate Q&A product with its own objects and its own like behavior, Salesforce folded self-service Q&A into the unified Chatter feed that already powered Communities. That gave customers one engagement model, one set of feed objects, and one place to extend with topics, moderation, and reputation, instead of a siloed feature that had drifted behind the rest of the platform.
The migration path off Chatter Answers
Salesforce shipped a Q&A Migration app to move Chatter Answers data into a modern community running Chatter Questions. The recommended approach depends on where the data lives. For a legacy Customer Portal, you build a fresh community on the Customer Service template, then run the migration app to bring the questions across. For an existing community, you keep it intact, migrate the Chatter Answers data with the app, and set up navigation topics so customers can browse the questions. For internal-only Q&A, you use the app to map your Chatter Answers data category to topics and migrate the questions into the org feed. In each path the app converts the underlying records, which is where the question-to-FeedItem and vote-to-FeedLike conversion happens. Hand-rolling the move is possible with the API, but the supported app is the safer route because it preserves the relationships between questions, replies, and the likes attached to them. After migration, the like a customer once gave in Chatter Answers is just a Chatter Like in the new community, with no special handling required.
What replaced the action: Chatter Questions
Chatter Questions is the current way to ask and answer in a Chatter or Experience Cloud feed. Instead of a separate Q&A product, a question is a FeedItem in the standard feed, replies are FeedComments, and a moderator or the asker can mark one reply as the best answer so it floats to the top. The like in this model is the ordinary Chatter Like primitive that works on every FeedItem and FeedComment. So the behavior a customer knew in Chatter Answers, like a helpful reply and watch the best answer rise, still exists, but it runs on the unified feed rather than the legacy Question and Reply objects. For an architect this is the important takeaway. There is no modern Like, Chatter Answers action to configure. If a requirement says customers should be able to endorse helpful answers in a self-service community, the answer today is Chatter Questions in Experience Cloud, with the standard Like and Best Answer features, plus topics and reputation for discovery.
Reading and cleaning up inherited orgs
Plenty of long-lived orgs still carry Chatter Answers history even though the UI is gone. You may find Question and Reply records, and FeedLike rows that trace back to that old engagement, sitting in the database with no community surface to render them. When you take over such an org, treat this as archival data. You can query it to understand how customers engaged historically, which helps you design the replacement community with realistic expectations about answer volume and participation. Cleanup usually means exporting the historical Q&A for the record, migrating any still-useful content into a Chatter Questions community, and retiring the leftover Chatter Answers setup nodes and references so new admins do not mistake them for live configuration. On the cert side, older Service Cloud and Community Cloud study guides mentioned this engagement model, but current exams cover Experience Cloud and the standard Chatter Like. Treat Like, Chatter Answers as history you should recognize, not a feature you would ever stand up new.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Like, Chatter Answers.
- Chatter Answers RetirementSalesforce
- Chatter Questions OverviewSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Like, 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 Like action in Chatter Answers lived inside which now-retired Salesforce product?
Q2. Where do customers using Chatter Answers get migrated, and what Like primitive does the destination use?
Q3. Which earlier products did Salesforce combine around 2010 to create the Chatter Answers community?
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