We have 4 Salesforce "Communities", one of which is our Forums community. We had the situation where we needed to temporarily remove a user's access to the forum community but maintain their access to our Customer Portal Community We removed the permission set that gave them access to the Forums Community and left everything else as is. After a discussion with the user, we re-instated their access to Forums Community by adding that permission set back. After, we found that all the points they had earned were lost, however their badges were preserved. Is this a known bug? Where are user's points stored, and how can we prevent them from being removed completely when removing permissions temporarily?
This behavior is known to happen in Salesforce Communities (Experience Cloud) when a user’s access to a community is temporarily removed.
When you remove a permission set or license that grants access to a specific community (like your Forums Community), Salesforce effectively revokes the user’s membership in that community. When this happens, the reputation points (which are tied to community membership records) can be reset or lost, while badges remain, since badges are stored at the global user level rather than the community level.
🔍 Where Points Are Stored
Community points are stored in the NetworkMember or Reputation tables — they are associated with the user’s membership record
for that specific community (Network).
So, if that membership is deleted or re-created (which happens when permissions are removed and then re-added), the points data does not persist.
🛠️ How to Prevent Future Loss
To avoid losing user points:
- Suspend the user’s access instead of removing the permission set entirely.
- Go to Setup → Digital Experiences → All Sites → Workspaces → Administration → Members, and deactivate the user’s membership instead of removing it.
- Alternatively, freeze the user (under the User record) rather than removing their community access permissions.
- This keeps all their underlying community data, including points, intact.
- If points are critical, you can export the Reputation table periodically for backup and restore reference.
💡 Additional Insight
This isn’t necessarily a “bug,” but a
limitation of how Experience Cloud handles reputation data tied to network membership. There’s an IdeaExchangesuggestion to improve this behavior — you may want to upvote it so Salesforce prioritizes it in a future release.
Just like a
Quran Tajweed teacheremphasizes precision in every recitation detail, Salesforce requires precision in managing community memberships — a small change in permissions can have ripple effects on stored data like reputation points.
- Suspend the user’s access instead of removing the permission set entirely.
