Popular Questions
A Popular Questions list was a sorted view inside Salesforce Chatter Answers and Experience Cloud Q&A that surfaced the questions a community engaged with most, ranked by views, replies, or votes.
Definition
A Popular Questions list was a sorted view inside Salesforce Chatter Answers and Experience Cloud Q&A that surfaced the questions a community engaged with most, ranked by views, replies, or votes. It gave new visitors a fast path to the topics other people kept asking about, so common answers stayed near the top instead of buried in a long feed.
This is a legacy idea. The Chatter Answers feature that hosted the original Popular Questions list is retired, and new orgs cannot enable it. The pattern of surfacing high-engagement questions now lives in Chatter Questions feeds and Experience Cloud topic and search experiences, which Salesforce recommends instead.
From a Chatter Answers list view to the Chatter Questions feed
Where Popular Questions came from
Popular Questions belonged to Chatter Answers, a self-service Q&A feature Salesforce shipped in Spring 12. Chatter Answers let customers ask questions in a public zone, reply to each other, and vote on the replies that helped. Each zone was a themed space, so a hardware vendor could keep printer questions separate from networking questions. The Popular Questions view sat on top of that data and ordered threads by engagement rather than by date. A question that drew dozens of views and several replies floated up, while a one-off that nobody answered stayed low. The goal was simple. A first-time visitor landing in the community should see the questions the crowd already cared about, not a raw reverse-chronological dump. Behind the scenes Chatter Answers was built on the Question standard object, the same object the older Answers feature used. That shared foundation is part of why Salesforce eventually consolidated these features. Maintaining two question models with overlapping behavior added complexity for admins and confused customers who could not tell Answers from Chatter Answers.
How popularity was actually measured
Popularity in this context was never a single official score. It was a sort applied to question records using the signals Chatter Answers tracked: view counts, the number of replies, and the votes (likes) those replies collected. A thread with a high reply count and strong upvotes ranked as more popular than a quiet one. Admins and community managers leaned on this ordering to read the room. If three of the top five popular questions all asked about the same billing step, that was a loud signal the product or the documentation had a gap. Treating the list as informal user research was one of its most useful side effects. The data told you what customers struggled with, in their own words, ranked by how many people shared the struggle. Teams used that to prioritize Knowledge articles, rewrite confusing help text, or file product feedback. The weakness was that engagement and accuracy are not the same thing. A popular question might have a wrong or outdated top reply, so moderators still had to review what rose to the top.
Why Chatter Answers (and its Popular Questions list) retired
Salesforce stopped letting new orgs turn on Chatter Answers in Summer 16 and moved the whole feature toward retirement. Existing customers were told to migrate their Q&A data into an Experience Cloud site and adopt Chatter Questions, the newer model. The retirement notice was direct: community pages configured for the old Answers data would stop working, and data could be lost without a migration. Salesforce published a Q&A migration app to move historical content rather than abandon it. The reason for the change was consolidation and a better data model. Chatter Answers and the legacy Answers feature both rode on the Question object and required their own tabs and setup. Chatter Questions instead builds on the Chatter data model, using Feed Post and Feed Comment objects, so a question is just another item in the same feed customers already read. That removed a separate silo and let Q&A inherit Chatter features like mentions, following, and moderation. The original Popular Questions list view did not carry over as a named feature. Its purpose was absorbed by feed ranking, topics, and search.
Chatter Questions, the modern replacement
Chatter Questions is the supported way to run Q&A in Salesforce today. A user picks the Question action in the Chatter publisher and posts the question straight into a feed, a group, or a record. Because it lives in the Chatter feed, there is no separate Answers tab to maintain. Anyone who can see the feed can reply. The person who asked, plus moderators, can mark one reply as the best answer, and Salesforce pins that answer to the top of the thread so future readers find it first. This best-answer pin is the practical successor to the old idea of surfacing the most helpful content. Instead of a separate Popular Questions screen, the strongest answer rises within the question itself. Chatter Questions also shows similar questions and suggested Knowledge articles as someone types, which heads off duplicate threads before they are posted. It works in Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience across most editions. Orgs created after Summer 14 get the Question action enabled by default, though admins usually still add it to the relevant page layouts so it is visible where people work.
Surfacing popular questions in Experience Cloud now
In a current Experience Cloud site you do not enable a feature literally named Popular Questions. You reproduce the outcome with the tools the platform gives you. Topics let you tag questions by subject, and a topic detail page collects every question and post under that subject, which naturally clusters the threads members care about. Site search and recommended content components push frequently matched questions and articles in front of new visitors. Component-based templates let an admin place a feed, a trending topics block, or a Knowledge component on the home page so high-traffic Q&A is visible immediately. The feed itself can be sorted, and members upvote helpful answers, so engagement still influences what stands out. For moderation, Question-to-Case lets a community manager escalate an unresolved or heavily viewed question into a support case. That keeps a popular but unanswered thread from being ignored. The net effect matches what the old list delivered. Customers see the questions the crowd is engaging with, the best answers are easy to spot, and the support team gets a signal about what to document next.
What to do if you still reference Popular Questions
If your team still talks about a Popular Questions list, it is almost certainly carryover language from a Chatter Answers or early community build. The practical move is to confirm whether any Chatter Answers data is still live and, if so, finish migrating it to an Experience Cloud site before the old pages break. After migration, stop looking for a dedicated popularity screen and instead set up the modern equivalents: enable Chatter Questions, organize content with topics, and add search and recommended-content components to the site home page. Keep using the engagement signal the original list taught you to read. Pull a report on questions with the most views or comments, look for clusters around the same problem, and turn those clusters into Knowledge articles. That habit is the real value of Popular Questions, and it survives the feature retirement. For administration, document which features your org actually has, since a mature org can carry traces of Answers, Chatter Answers, and Chatter Questions at once. Knowing which one is current prevents you from troubleshooting a list view that no longer exists.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Differences Between Q&A Features in SalesforceSalesforce
- Chatter Answers RetirementSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Popular Questions.
- Chatter Questions OverviewSalesforce
- Question-to-CaseSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Popular Questions.
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.
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