One of the foundations of the Tableau community (or DataFam, as we call it) has always been the Tableau Forums, where anyone can ask a question about Tableau and receive answers. The Forums were integrated into the Salesforce system at the end of 2025, but I’ll start the story at the beginning.
For years of working with Tableau, I was aware of the forums, but not active on them. If you searched on Google for an answer on some issue, many of the solutions displayed would be from the forums, which were open to anyone to read, so I read many of the threads, but I never actually created a user and logged in.
In June 2020, feeling that I was already a Tableau expert and I needed to contribute, I decided to act. I created a user, and committed to answering at least one open question every week. From that point onwards I was in the system, and learnt the rules:
- You received 10 points for answering a question, and 25 points when marked as “best answer”.
- These points were accummulated and you then received “badges”, with colorful icons and catchy names. There were 15 levels, going up to V.I.P. (Viz Insights Pro) at 7,900 points. You can see my progress in a viz I created on Tableau Public when I reached that level, after almost 3 years of activity.
- You could also see where you were ranked on the “Leaderboard”, especially in the all-time rankings. After VIP level my aim was always to break into the top 100 all-time, and I succeeded in doing this around the beginning of 2025, with about 14,000 points. For comparison, the all-time leader is Jim Dehner (still active), who reached 500,000 points, and there are several more with over 100,000. Get a life!
As time went on I increased my cadence, of course. I would log in weekly to look for a question to answer, and if I saw more than one opportunity I answered two or three. And then my answer would need a follow-up, so I logged in again, and so on. In June 2022, when the annual nominations for Tableau Forums Ambassadors came up, I was contacted by Ciara Brennan, who was in charge of the forums from the Tableau side (already Salesforce by then), and encouraged to nominate myself. Obviously my nomination was accepted, and I became an Ambassador for the first time.
Becoming an Ambassador opened up new horizons. There were 40-60 Forums Ambassadors each year, and we were the ones answering a large majority of the questions. In addition, we were the moderators of the forums: suspicious messages, or those from new users, were on hold until we released them – or deleted and flagged the spam account for removal. We could also remove or edit messages that weren’t identified by the system as spam. The spam included a lot of weird marketing bots, but later on we had to cope with AI-generated answers as well.
Ambassadors could also mark answers as “accepted”, as many users don’t do that for their own questions, and this is the best way to close an open question. So sometimes I would get a bunch of “Your answer was accepted” emails together, and I knew some other Ambassador was working on a cleanup.
All this was orchestrated by Ciara, who organized monthly Zoom meetings, where I made new acquaintances, updated us with statistics, planned Sprints for specific subjects, and searched for experts to answer difficult questions that were being neglected.
Towards the end of 2025, two things happened. First, the Ambassador system changed. Instead of grouping everyone by subjects (Public, Forums, User Group, Social, Academic, etc.), all these were bunched into a single definition of “Tableau Community Ambassadors”, so now there is no defined group of Forum Ambassadors who can collaborate and moderate the forums. At the same time, the whole Forums system was migrated to the Salesforce platform on Trailhead.
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazer-community/neighborhoods/tableau
The Salesforce system has been serving Salesforce customers for years, and is certainly more robust and advanced than the old forums website on Tableau, which was quite ancient. The main advantages are:
- A more modern interface.
- Maintained as part of the Salesforce website.
- A much better spam filter.
- and… that’s about it
At the moment, a few months on, we’re still learning and improving, but from my viewpoint as a Tableau expert there are quite a few disadvantages. Let’s start with the unavoidable consequences of the migration:
- Users had to create a new login on Trailhead.
- All existing content was migrated, but users who didn’t create a corresponding login now appear as anonymous in the history, and links that pointed to other Tableau forums posts were broken.
- All the leaderboard history is gone ☹
The process of asking and answering questions is more or less the same, though without the special Ambassador privileges from before. There is a sort of points system, but there’s no real leaderboard and you can only see the 5 top points earners in the last 30 days. I can see my total answers and ranking for all time, but no other statistics.
It’s a bit more difficult to browse by subject/topic, because the Tableau topics are only part of the whole, but once you know what to put in the URL you can save a direct link and shorten the process. I use this one: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazer-community/neighborhoods/tableau/feed?sort=CREATED_DATE_DESC&filter=UNANSWERED_QUESTIONS
So is it working? Yes, but less. It’s difficult to count, but I think there were 500-1,000 new questions per month in the old forums, and some statistics that we were shown in the old Ambassador meetings support that. I counted before the forums closed, and there were over 50 questions in the last 3 days (22-24 October 2025), and the 24th wasn’t even a full day. In comparison, I counted about 30 questions a week (let’s say up to 150 a month) on the Salesforce platform – probably 70-80% less.
One of the reasons is the Tableau community Slack channel “community-tableau-questions”, which serves as an additional question and answer forum, and has at least 50-60 questions a month. It’s a nice idea, but it’s a closed system (though there are over 20,000 users), and there’s no real searchability and history like on the Trailhead site – so I would really prefer if the channel was closed and traffic directed to Trailhead.
Another reason could be AI, but that’s a totally different issue…
Obviously, with less new questions, it’s more difficult to find interesting ones to answer, but I’m still trying to meet my weekly “quota” and be active. I hope traffic increases as time goes by, and more new users login to Trailhead. The Tableau Forums are definitely not dead, just modernized – though I suspect many of us miss our old, creaking haunting grounds.
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