Top All-Time Ideas
Top All-Time Ideas is a subtab in the legacy Salesforce Ideas feature that lists ideas ordered by their total point score, from highest to lowest, across the entire life of an Ideas community.
Definition
Top All-Time Ideas is a subtab in the legacy Salesforce Ideas feature that lists ideas ordered by their total point score, from highest to lowest, across the entire life of an Ideas community. Points come from votes, where each promote adds 10 points and each demote removes 10, so the subtab surfaces the suggestions that have collected the most net support since the community opened.
It is a lifetime leaderboard, not a trending feed. The ranking ignores when the votes were cast and looks only at the cumulative total, which is why a years-old idea with a large vote bank can sit at the top. Ideas is now classified by Salesforce as a legacy service feature, so newer feedback programs are usually built in Experience Cloud or on a custom object instead.
How the all-time leaderboard is built and where it fits
Where the subtab lives in the Ideas feature
Salesforce Ideas gives community members an online space to post suggestions, vote on them, and discuss them in comments. Each Ideas tab presents the same pool of ideas through a few subtabs, and Top All-Time Ideas is one of them. The others are Popular Ideas and Recent Ideas, plus a Comments view for the latest discussion activity. All four read from the same set of records, so an idea can appear in every subtab at once. The difference is purely the sort order each subtab applies. Top All-Time Ideas orders by total points descending, which means the highest-scoring suggestions float to the top regardless of age. Members reach these subtabs from the Ideas tab inside an Experience Cloud site or, in older orgs, the standard Ideas tab. Because the data is shared, an idea that climbs the all-time list does not leave the Recent or Popular views. It simply ranks differently in each, depending on whether the sort cares about raw totals, vote recency, or submission date.
Points, votes, and how the score is set
The score behind the ranking is built entirely from votes. When a member promotes an idea they agree with, Salesforce adds 10 points to it. When they demote one they dislike, it subtracts 10 points. A member can only vote once per idea, and the two directions are mutually exclusive. You cannot promote an idea you have already demoted, and you cannot promote the same idea twice. Posting your own idea automatically casts a promote vote on it, so every new idea starts at 10 points. Scores can also go negative when demotes outnumber promotes, which pushes an idea toward the bottom of the all-time list. Because Top All-Time Ideas sorts on this running total, the subtab is really a view of net lifetime support. There is no time decay applied here. An idea that gathered hundreds of promotes five years ago keeps that score and keeps its high position until a fresher idea accumulates more total points. That permanence is the whole point of an all-time view.
Top All-Time versus Popular Ideas
The cleanest way to understand Top All-Time Ideas is to compare it with the Popular Ideas subtab, since the two look similar but rank on different math. Top All-Time uses the raw cumulative point total. Popular Ideas uses an internal calculation that weights the age of an idea's positive votes, so recently promoted ideas rise even if their lifetime total is modest. The Popular ranking is governed by a Half-Life setting that an admin configures in days. Salesforce describes it as controlling how quickly old ideas drop on the Popular subtab to make room for ideas with more recent votes, where a shorter half-life moves older ideas down faster. Top All-Time has no equivalent knob. It is a flat sort on points. So a long-dormant idea with a huge vote bank can dominate Top All-Time while slipping off Popular entirely. Use Top All-Time to read long-term community priorities, and Popular to see what is gaining momentum right now.
Reading the list to understand community priorities
The practical value of an all-time leaderboard is signal about what a community has cared about most over its whole history. A product or program team can scan the top of the list and see which requests earned the deepest support, then weigh that against the current Status assigned to each idea, such as Under Review or Coming Soon. Because the ranking is cumulative, it tends to be stable and slow to change, which makes it a good reference for roadmap conversations that span quarters. Filters layer on top of the sort. Members can narrow the same all-time view by category, by Idea Theme, by status, or by zone, so a team can ask a sharper question like which security ideas have the most all-time support. One caveat worth keeping in mind: a high all-time score reflects total votes, not unanimous agreement. An idea can carry a large net total and still have meaningful demotes underneath it, so the headline number rewards reading the underlying comments before treating it as consensus.
Why Ideas is now a legacy feature
Salesforce documents Ideas as a legacy service feature. It still functions in orgs that have it, and the Idea object, votes, and these subtabs continue to work, but it no longer receives the investment that current products get. The voting model and the all-time ranking were designed years ago, before Experience Cloud matured and before modern community templates became the default way to build customer-facing sites. Salesforce has not published a single drop-in replacement that recreates the Top All-Time subtab exactly. Teams starting a new feedback program today usually build it differently. Common paths are a custom object that captures submissions with a rollup of votes, an Experience Cloud site with custom components, or a dedicated third-party idea-management product. The pattern that Top All-Time embodied, ranking community suggestions by accumulated support, remains useful. What changed is the tooling. If you inherit an org still running classic Ideas, treat the all-time list as a working artifact, but plan any new build on a more current foundation.
Where the ranking data comes from
Behind the subtab sits the Idea object, the standard record type that stores each suggestion along with its title, body, category, status, and zone. Votes are stored separately and roll up into the point total that the all-time view sorts on. Because these are real records, admins and developers can report on them outside the subtab itself. You can build a list view or report on the Idea object sorted by the vote total to recreate an all-time ranking in a report tab, which is handy when the built-in subtab is not exposed in a given site. Comment counts and vote counts are available on the records too, so a report can show support and discussion side by side. This matters for the legacy story. Even where the classic Ideas UI feels dated, the underlying data is structured and queryable, so migrating to a custom solution often starts by exporting these Idea records and their vote totals. The all-time ordering is just a sort over data you already own.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- View IdeasSalesforce
- Vote on IdeasSalesforce
- Enable and Customize Ideas SettingsSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Top All-Time Ideas.
- Understand and Work with IdeasSalesforce
- View IdeasSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Top All-Time Ideas.
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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