Topics, Chatter Answers
Topics, Chatter Answers was the name for the subject categories that sorted questions inside a Chatter Answers zone.
Definition
Topics, Chatter Answers was the name for the subject categories that sorted questions inside a Chatter Answers zone. The topic list came from a data category group, so a member asking about billing picked Billing and the question landed in a browsable bucket instead of a flat stream.
Both the tagging and the product around it are retired. These days it turns up in inherited runbooks and old data model diagrams far more often than in any live org.
In plain English
“Picture an old customer help forum where every question had to be filed under a subject, like Billing or Shipping, so people could browse instead of scrolling forever. Salesforce ran that kind of forum, then closed it. The subject labels moved into a newer tool.”
Worked example
A regional internet provider ran a Chatter Answers zone called Support Zone. Its topics came from a data category group named Products, holding Billing, Modems, Outages, and Installation. A customer asking why a modem dropped every night at 2 AM tagged the question Modems, so it sat with the other modem threads rather than one undifferentiated list. Nobody picks Modems from a list any more. The same customer would post a Chatter Question, and Topics would do the filing.
How a Chatter Answers zone filed its questions
Topics were data categories under another name
In a zone the topic list was not free text. An admin associated the zone with a data category group, and those categories became the choices members saw. Zones let one company run several focused Q&A areas, each with its own answers topics. One category selection per question was the documented limit, which kept the taxonomy shallow and admin-owned.
End of support and retirement are two dates
The Winter '18 release notes fixed the first one. Support ended in Spring '18: zones kept working for posting and reading, but Salesforce stopped shipping fixes and updates for the feature. Removal runs on a separate clock. The active retirements page gives that timing as Order End Date, so a surviving org keeps its zones until the contract lapses.
The migration could carry the tags across
Salesforce shipped a Q&A Migration app to move zone content into a Chatter Questions site, and the sequencing instruction is blunt. Create the navigation topic in the destination site before you run the app. Those topics replicate the data categories from the old portal. Skip it and you keep the questions but lose the filing system.
Where tagging lives now
Modern Topics are crowdsourced words attached to posts, records and Knowledge articles, not one zone's category group. One prerequisite catches people out. New orgs from Summer '26 onward ship with Chatter switched off, so enable it under Setup, Chatter Settings before Chatter Questions or Topics will show up at all. Then turn on Topics for Objects from Setup and add the Topics component to record pages. In an Experience Cloud site, navigational topics build the menu.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Chatter Answers Retirement (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Salesforce Active Product and Feature Retirements (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- QuestionDataCategorySelection | Object Reference for the Salesforce Platform (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Salesforce Winter '18 Release Notes: Chatter Answers is No Longer Supported in Spring '18 (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Chatter Is Turned Off by Default in New Orgs (Summer '26) (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Chatter Answers and Ideas (Apex Developer Guide) (opens in new tab)Salesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Topics, Chatter Answers.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Topics, 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 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. In a Chatter Answers zone, where did the list of available topics come from?
Q2. What retirement timing does Salesforce publish for Chatter Answers?
Q3. Before running the Salesforce Q&A Migration app, what should an admin set up in the destination site?
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