[SalesForce] Chatter Answers Test Failures – Invalid field CommunityId for sObject Case

After winter '13 when deploying to production I'm getting a failure in ChatterAnswersEscalationTriggerTest that communityId is not a valid case field. Any ideas why this field would spontaneously disappear?

When testing in my dev org this field is available and per the webservices api the field is available for all orgs as of api version 24. The class was installed automatically when sites was first enabled (along with the rest of the standard sites classes and pages). Api version of the test class and related trigger is 25. The case community lookup no longer shows up on the case detail page or in describe calls in the dev console. But answers and communities are all turned on. Perhaps there is setting that got disabled that I'm missing?

Best Answer

Opened a case, 08195951, with support. Ends up this is a catch 22 issue. The org had licenses for Chatter Answers which had been deactivated. While Answers was still actively being used via other licenses, with the licenses deactivated the system hid the communityId field. I'm still not clear as to why the field gets hidden when the community, answers, and questions objects were still available. This also falls into the category of surprise reasons you can't do any deployments. Sigh ...