---
schema_version: "1"
id: 7f568ad7a0eab5ee7b679e0ffa2240a005be042f5026d6d9bf5a5139857e0c8c
title: Create and Edit Zones
collection: admin
version: current
locale: en-us
portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/admin/current/en-us/service/264-0-0/ideas_new_comm.md
canonical_url: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.ideas_new_comm.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5
source_site: help.salesforce.com
content_type: documentation
content_hash: a44cf114ac9ff5628658259946c82de4be01c24f6b194b9194647085fcef1284
description: Zones are shared by the Ideas, Answers, and Chatter Answers applications, allowing you to view and create zones from those locations. Answers can have only one zone displayed at a time. Supported editions allow up to 50 zones per organization.
products:
- Service Cloud
release: "264"
---
# Create and Edit Zones
Zones are shared by the Ideas, Answers, and Chatter Answers applications, allowing you to view and create zones from those locations. Answers can have only one zone displayed at a time. Supported editions allow up to 50 zones per organization.
### Required Editions
1. From Setup, enter Zones in the Quick Find box, then select **Zones** under **Answers**, **Ideas Zones**, or **Chatter Answers Zones**.
2. Click **Edit** next to the zone that you want to change, or click **New** to create a zone.
3. Enter a unique name for your zone that clearly identifies the zone's purpose.
4. Optionally, enter a description in plain text. HTML and other markup languages aren’t supported.
5. To display the zone to your Ideas, Answers, or Chatter Answers community, select the Active checkbox.
6. To specify how usernames appear in posted questions and answers throughout the zone, select the Username Format. Chatter Answers uses the Username Format for questions and answers only. Ideas uses the Nickname for usernames in an Idea community rather than the Username Format in a zone.
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.
7. Specify where you want this zone displayed.
- 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.
8. To associate the zone with Chatter Answers, select Enable for Chatter Answers.
9. To let customers post their questions privately to customer support (create cases), select Enable Private Questions. If you don’t select this setting, support agents can still initiate private communications with customers.
10. In Visualforce Page That Hosts Your Zone’s Feeds, click  and choose the Visualforce page on which questions, replies, and knowledge articles display.
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.
11. In Site That Hosts Your Zone, click the lookup (magnifying glass) icon and choose the Salesforce Site on which you want to host the zone.
- 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.
12. Optionally, in Email Notification URL, customize the URL that’s included in email notifications sent from the zone.
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.
13. In Customer Support Agents Group, select the public group of users to act as support agents for the zone. These users have a headset icon next to their username in the zone.
14. Optionally, you can choose a file to incorporate your brand into email notifications that are sent from the zone. In Header or Footer, click  and choose a text or HTML file.
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.
15. From the list of predefined data categories, select the data categories that you want exposed to the zone.
16. To set up Ideas for the zone, use the Experts group field to select the public group of experts to monitor the zone for Ideas.
17. Click **Save**.
#### See Also
- [Use Zones to Organize Idea Communities](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.ideas_communities.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5 "Zones organize ideas and questions into logical groups, with each zone having its own focus and unique ideas and questions. Zones are shared by the Ideas, Answers, and Chatter Answers applications, allowing you to view and create zones from those locations.")
- [Select Picklist Values and Defaults for a Zone](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.ideas_add_category.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5 "After you define picklist values for the Categories and Status fields, you can add and remove picklist values from these fields on a per-zone basis and specify a default value.")
- [Designate Community Experts](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=service.ideas_community_experts.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5 "Designate your star users as experts in their Ideas community.")