Popular Questions
Popular Questions was a sorted view inside Salesforce Chatter Answers that ranked a zone's questions by engagement instead of by date, using views, reply counts, and votes.
Definition
Popular Questions was a sorted view inside Salesforce Chatter Answers that ranked a zone's questions by engagement instead of by date, using views, reply counts, and votes. It pushed threads the community kept returning to toward the top, so new visitors met the common problems first.
That view is retired along with the feature that hosted it. Chatter Answers stopped being available to new orgs in Summer '16, and Salesforce now lists it as a product retirement with Chatter Questions as the replacement. No current org has anything called Popular Questions.
The idea outlived the label: Chatter Questions pins a best answer atop each thread, and Experience Cloud sites raise busy subjects through topics and search.
In plain English
“Imagine a help desk with a noticeboard. Instead of pinning whatever question came in last, it pinned the ones the most people had already asked and answered. Salesforce took that board down years ago and moved the same information into its main message feed.”
Worked example
A regional internet provider ran a Chatter Answers zone called Home Networking. Its Popular Questions view sorted by reply count, so a thread titled 'Router drops at 2am' sat on top with 41 replies and 2,300 views while a same-week thread with zero replies sank. The support lead read that ranking weekly and turned the top three into Knowledge articles. After the retirement, the team rebuilt the habit in an Experience Cloud site by tagging question posts with a Router Setup topic, so the topic page collects what the ranking used to reveal.
Where the Popular Questions ranking went
How the ranking was built
Popularity here was a sort, not a stored score. Chatter Answers tracked views on a question, replies against it, and votes on those replies, and the view ordered threads by those signals. A quiet thread stayed low no matter how correct it was. Engagement told you what people struggled with, never whether the top reply was right.
Why Chatter Answers went away
Salesforce ran three overlapping Q&A features. Answers arrived in Winter '11 and Chatter Answers in Spring '12, both riding the Question standard object. New orgs lost Answers in Summer '13 and Chatter Answers in Summer '16. Chatter Questions, from Winter '15, sits on Feed Post and Feed Comment records instead.
What replaced the top-of-list slot
Chatter Questions has no popularity screen. The asker, a moderator, or an admin marks one reply as best, and Salesforce copies it to the top of the answer list with a check mark. The thread promotes its own strongest content. Similar questions and Knowledge suggestions also appear while someone types, which kills duplicates before they post.
Rebuilding the signal in Experience Cloud
Nothing switches on under the name Popular Questions. You assemble the outcome: topics group questions by subject, a trending topics component surfaces what members engage with, and site search pushes matched threads forward. One catch before you plan a site: Salesforce documents Chatter Questions for sites under Chatter features for Aura and Visualforce, not LWR.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Popular Questions.
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 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 did the Popular Questions view in Chatter Answers actually sort by?
Q2. Which feature does Salesforce name as the replacement for Chatter Answers?
Q3. In a current Experience Cloud site, how do you reproduce what Popular Questions did?
Discussion
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