Salesforce Communities: Password Reset Email, Default Community Considerations

My current work involved implementing a customer community / experience cloud site for about 2000 pre-registered users. I had made a few observations during my implementation and these were not easy to find online and did not have a direct answer. So after raising a case with Salesforce and after multiple interactions, here are they are:

Custom Domain & Password Reset

I enabled custom domain for our community. The default Salesforce generated community URL was (e.g.
https://racoon.cs74.force.com/avengerscommunity).

Now, I enabled custom domain (e.g. https://avengers.community.com)to redirect requests from the above salesforce generated URL to the custom one. Redirect worked perfectly. Now, the enterprise where this was being implemented introduced a WAF- Web Application Firewall (Imperva :https://www.imperva.com/products/web-application-firewall-waf/) to front the custom domain.

The Problem: Let’s say a community user resets his/her password. The Salesforce generated link for password reset will still use the default link (https://racoon.cs74.force.com/avengerscommunity/passwordreset/…….) and not the custom URL that was created.

So, what’s wrong with that? If you had built the login page using the community builder (https://avengers.community.com/s/login) then the user will NOT be taken to this page after a logout post password reset. That can be a not so great user experience when the user does not see the branding and sees the default salesforce login page.

Solution: Salesforce support team has confirmed that when using a WAF to front a community, the default password reset link will not be replaced with a custom domain and the above mentioned behaviour is a limitation. Or, one could built a completely custom login & logout experience.

Please be mindful of this behaviour and also do check with Salesforce if this has been fixed or if there is any easy workaround in the future.

Password Reset Emails with Multiple Communities

I also had a need to redirect a community user from one community(A: login based only) to another community(B: guest user & login). So, for this the user was made a member of both the communities (by adding corresponding profiles). Now, if the user resets a password on community A, he might get a password reset email from community B.

To solve for this, always set the ‘Default Community’ on the profile if you are using multiple communities.

Thank you for reading!!! Have a great day :)