Create and Edit Zones

You can't delete zones, so to hide a zone, make sure Active isn't selected. All active zones are automatically available from the Ideas tab, but you can assign only one active zone to Answers.

For Chatter Answers, first names are used for users in the Customer Support Agents Group even if Nickname is selected as the Username Format for the zone.

• Community lets you select an Idea, Answers, or Chatter Answers community. For Chatter Answers only, you can also select Visible Without Authentication to let guest users view activity within the zone without signing in.
• Internal Only displays the zone to internal users only. Portal and Experience Cloud site members can’t see internal zones.
• Portal lets you select from a list of existing portals.

  To make a zone publicly available, select the Customer Portal that you plan to expose publicly using Salesforce Sites. Chatter Answers is supported on Salesforce Sites. Answers isn’t supported on Salesforce Sites. If you reassign a zone to a different Ideas, Answers, or Chatter Answers community, the items that are associated with that zone move to the new community. Users who are logged in to the original community can’t view the items that have been moved, including from the Recent Items section of the sidebar column. If the zone is moved back to the original community, the ability to view those items is restored.

The page you choose must include either the chatteranswers:allfeeds component or a combination of the following components: chatteranswers:aboutme, chatteranswers:guestsignin, chatteranswers:feedfilter, chatteranswers:feeds, chatteranswers:searchask, chatteranswers:datacategoryfilter. Using one of these components ensures that the zone is linked to your Salesforce Site correctly. If you don’t choose a Visualforce page, one is automatically generated when you save your zone. The generated page includes your zone’s ID so that topics, questions, and replies are associated with your specific zone and can display on it. The page is named after your zone with a suffix of “_main,” for example, ZoneName_main. The page also includes a language attribute that matches your organization’s default language.

You can use the NoSignIn Boolean attribute in the chatteranswers:allfeeds, chatteranswers:aboutme, chatteranswers:feeds or chatteranswers:searchask components. The attribute removes all sign-in links from your zone. Use this option when you have an external sign-in path and want to ensure that your users follow it instead of the standard Chatter Answers sign-in. When the NoSignIn Boolean attribute is true, users can still search and view publicly accessible content for the zone. If they already have a valid session, they can still post questions, reply, vote, and flag content.

• If you associated the zone with a portal, you can enter a Salesforce Site domain.
• If you associated the zone with an Experience Cloud site that doesn’t require authentication for users to view zone activity, the domain is populated automatically.

The email notification URL is generated automatically to be adapted to the “visibility” settings of the zone. But it can be modified to fit specific needs or use cases. If you have a customized login page, enter its URL. For example, if you’ve created a login page from which users can access multiple zones, you can customize Email Notification URL to redirect users to that page from email notifications.

Manually update the Email Notification URL when you have an existing URL for notifications for an internal zone and a company-specific subdomain. To update the URL, clear the existing URL so that the field is blank. Save the page, and the system populates the field with the new My Domain URL.

You can choose only from files that are uploaded to a publicly accessible folder on the Documents tab and marked Externally Available Image. The files that you include in the fields can have a combined size of up to 10 KB.