Salesforce Ideas is a great platform for sharing thoughts that turn into useful innovations. Org members can freely express their ideas, discuss on each idea, vote on ideas they think are worthy, and work with other org members collaboratively to achieve success. Ideas is a transparent community that speaks for itself and brings abundant learnings and growth to its members.
Community members are free to post ideas that they think are relevant to their business. But sometimes, certain ideas that were once fresh and relevant become relatively obsolete as time goes by. To prevent the build-up of obsolete ideas on the platform, Salesforce came up with a feature called half-life.
Half Life in Salesforce Ideas Defined
Half-life is a Salesforce terminology referring to the time it takes for an old idea to drop its ranking. An old idea’s half-life is usually determined by a specific number of days.
Old ideas move down once they’ve reached their half-life to enable newer and fresher ideas to take center place. This is so that each new idea is given a chance to be seen, discussed, voted upon, and worked upon by the Ideas community members.
How Does Half Life Work?
A new idea posted on the platform is visible to members until it exhausts its half-life. This new idea can be up-voted by members and may move higher on the Popular Ideas tab. But once the number of half-life days are reached, the idea becomes old as newer ideas start kicking in. This old idea now moves down the Popular Ideas subtab.
A shorter half-life denotes faster dropping down in the Popular Ideas subtab. Likewise, a longer half-life means an idea is likely to stay longer in the Popular Ideas subtab.
How to Set Up Half-Life
Your org’s default half-life can be customized easily by going to Ideas Settings via the Quick Find box. Here, you’ll see different options for setting up your Ideas platform. Scroll to the end and locate the Half-Life setting. Enter your desired number of days and click Save.
To wrap it up, half-life is a setting that determines the number of days an idea stays in the Popular Ideas subtab. Half-life is created to enable the platform to give ample exposure to both old and new ideas that your community just might need.