If you have opened Salesforce Help or Trailhead recently, you will have seen the banner: "The online Trailblazer Community becomes read-only Oct 30, 2026." For a lot of admins and developers that forum has been the first place to go with a question for over a decade, so it is worth knowing exactly what is happening.
In short: nothing is being deleted, but you cannot post on the web forums after 30 October. New conversations move to a free Trailblazer Community workspace in Slack, which Salesforce says will be generally available in November 2026. There will be a short gap in between.
Everything below comes from Salesforce's announcement blog post (15 September 2026) and the official Trailblazer Community in Slack FAQ (dated 1 October 2026, linked from the Trailblazer Community page).
The timeline
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| Until 29 October 2026 | Forums work as normal |
| 30 October 2026 | Forums become read-only: browse, search and read, but no new posts or comments |
| November 2026 | Trailblazer Community in Slack becomes generally available; all new discussion happens there |
| Early 2027 | Accepted answers from Slack product channels start syncing back to the web, anonymised and summarised, so they can be found in search |
Salesforce's FAQ is direct about the gap between read-only and launch: content is not gone, posting is paused while the community's data is migrated.
What "read-only" means
From 30 October you can browse, search and view every historical discussion and post, but you can't create new posts or comments. Salesforce says you do not need to save anything: all historical posts and data stay on the website for future reference.
That matters for search. Years of answered questions about validation rules, flows and Apex errors stay where Google already finds them.
How the Slack community will work
- It is free. No Slack licence is needed, and the community stays open to everyone.
- You sign in with your Trailblazer ID. No new credentials. You can add the workspace to the Slack app you already use, alongside your work workspaces.
- Use a personal email on your Trailblazer ID. Salesforce recommends this so your community connections stay with you when you change jobs.
- Channels are public. Private channels will not be available for individual community groups. You can request new public channels after launch.
- Global topic channels cover broad areas such as Admins, Developers, Architects and Agentforce.
- Regional hub channels (for example
#hub-northern-california) replace a one-to-one migration of local groups. - Help is built in. Slackbot acts as a guide to channels, answers and Trailhead content, and an Answers Agent answers questions directly.
- Digests are possible. If you prefer a forum-style summary, you can set notification preferences to receive email summaries.
Salesforce will share the join link closer to launch. If you are new to Slack, Trailhead's Get Started in Slack trail is the suggested starting point.
What happens to Trailblazer Community Groups
Online Chatter groups do not move to Slack as channels. Group leaders keep using trailblazercommunitygroups.com for membership, meetings, events and sharing slides and recordings. Local groups get pulled together in regional hub channels in Slack.
If you run a user group, look out for the leader training sessions Salesforce is running through October, and plan where your group's day-to-day chat will live.
If your employer blocks Slack
This is the question many admins will hit first. Salesforce's answer: the web content stays readable, but new posts happen only in Slack. If you cannot use Slack on a work device, the FAQ suggests using a personal device with the personal email on your Trailblazer ID, through the Slack app or a web browser.
Before you do that, check your employer's policy on discussing work systems from personal devices, and never paste org data, record IDs, usernames or error messages containing customer data into a public channel. Public Slack channels are public in the same way the forums were, and will soon feed search engines and AI models.
Where to get Salesforce help in the gap
Between 30 October and the Slack launch, and after it, it helps to have more than one route.
- Search the read-only forums. Most common errors already have an answered thread. Add the exact error text to your search.
- Salesforce Help and Known Issues. For anything that looks like a platform bug, check Known Issues before you spend an afternoon on it.
- Open a support case for production problems. Community answers were never a substitute for this.
- Salesforce Stack Exchange is a separate Q&A site, popular with developers.
- Ask about your own org, not a generic one. Most forum questions are really "why does my org do this?" The answer depends on your fields, automation, sharing and code, which nobody in a forum can see.
That last point is where orgadmin.ai's AI Org Chat is useful. It answers questions about your org from your org's own metadata: what fields an object has, everything that fires when a record saves (triggers, flows, validation rules), where a field is referenced, and live SELECT-only SOQL for data questions. For "why did this transaction fail?", the debug log analyser reads the log and points to the line that matters.
Community advice is still the best source of judgement and experience. An assistant that can see your configuration is the faster route to the facts. Use both.
A short checklist before 30 October
- Make sure your Trailblazer ID uses an email you will keep, ideally personal
- Bookmark threads you rely on (they stay readable, but bookmarks save searching)
- Post any question you need answered this month before 30 October
- Check whether Slack is allowed on your work devices and network
- If you lead a community group, confirm your plans on trailblazercommunitygroups.com
- Follow the Trailblazer Community on LinkedIn for the Slack join link
Last checked 14 October 2026 against Salesforce's announcement and the official FAQ dated 1 October 2026. We will update this post with the join link and launch date once Salesforce publishes them.