Content Protection

Hi Mike! This would be dependent on where you are publishing/hosting your content. 

Perhaps others in the community that have done so, will be able to chime in and assist. 

Where are you planning on publishing your content?

What do you want to avoid by protection? Someone viewing the content too many times? Someone taking the content and publishing it themselves? someone making something like yours? ...

Hi Mike,

This is usually achieved through your Learning Management System. The LMS you'll be using should be able to support content protection.

Thanks for your feedback.

Moodle will be the primary source of how users view the content however my client also wants to publish this content to CDs/Thumb drives for certain individuals. I think the best I could do is add a password to this cd, but once that is given out there is not stopping anyone from recording/saving the content. 

Is there any such program/code that can limit the amount of times the content is viewed and then lock it down/destroy it?

Thanks,

Mike

Unfortunately, no. CD/DVD are read-only media. The only way around this would be to introduce a license server, but that would require online access, so this defeats the purpose of CD/DVD right there.

Hi Mike,

As you've seen here, there isn't a way to protect or lock down the .story file or the published output. I know it's been a common question in the forums before - so you may want to share more about your concerns with what you don't want people to do or be able to do with the course so that folks could weigh in on specifics. 

I would use Alexandros' solution of a license server. Publishing to a CD doesn't necessarily mean that the user doesn't have ANY internet access, just that it might be too low bandwidth to download all the content in the course. Even dial-up access would be sufficient for a license server. You would just have to make that a requirement to run it, that they have SOME type of internet access.

Another solution might be to detect the system date and make the course "expire" after a particular date. Of course this could be defeated by changing the date on the computer running the course. I can't think of a perfect solution off hand, but those are some options.

I can think of one other possibility for flash drives, but it wouldn't work for read-only CDs...

Mike,

How would I go about making the course expire based on the date? Would this work on a published CD?

Thanks

You would most likely have to use some javascript to get the system date, similar to the code here: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/javascript-current-date-coding-using-full-month-day-and-year-i-e-january-1-2015 . I'm not sure if SL has any built in functions to provide the current date.

I can't think of any reason that this wouldn't work on a CD. Anyone else?

It's possible your js code may only run locally if you are viewing the html5 version. I'm sorry I don't have time to test this right now...maybe tomorrow.

You could use the system date solution described in Articulate's best practices doc but again you'd be prone to quick and dirty hacks such as simply changing the clock back to a different date. As such, you should include a function to check the date server-side (i.e. against a time server, or the system date of your (/clients) server.

Hope this helps,
Alex

Thanks! That would probably be good. I am not great at javascript and can not tell from that site exactly what I would do? Are there more descriptive directions anywhere?

Thanks,

Mike

It would be best to find someone proficient in javascript, show them the samples that work in Storyline, and tell them what you would like it to do. They can just have the js set some variable values for you and you can use triggers from there. I'd do it, but I'm a novice at js.

Javascript works on the client side, to get a server date you need to use something like php, this may not work when run from a CD

Yes, I was speaking only of the client side date.