Published Work Not Playing Once Moved

Hi Robert-

Welcome to Heroes- thanks so much for taking that time to reach out to us here! Since you used the option Publish for Web, you'll want to make sure to upload the published output to a web environment, such as tempshare, to properly test it. If you view an Articulate Storyline course on your local hard drive (or send it to someone else to view on their local hard drive), you'll encounter security restrictions from the computer, web browser, Flash Player, and network that'll cause various features of your content to fail. You'll want to may sure to upload it to it's intended environment to prevent unwanted behavior. 

If you want to be able to view your course locally, Publish for CD will be the option you'd want to use. Using that option, when the published output is on your local drive you can double click the Launch_story.exe to view your course. 

Hope that helps clarify a bit, please let me know if you have further questions! :)

Hey Ali -

I fully understand your answer however that's not the problem. The published course has yet to leave my desktop.

When I publish for web and place it on my desktop, as you know the software creates (what I call) a "published" folder which contains the documents that make up the course (story content folder, meta file, story html, story shockwave flash, etc.). If I click the story html, it works perfectly.

However, if I were to take that "published" folder and simply move it to a secondary folder, still on my desktop, it does not play and all I get is the background with the spinning wheel. To make matter more maddening, if I were to remove the "published" folder from the secondary folder (which is still on my desktop) and simply place it back on my desktop out of the secondary folder, it plays.

I've tried copying from the "published" folder to a second folder (again still on my desktop) and it would not play. I've even moved the files out of the "published" folder and simply placed them on my desktop and it still will not play.

Hi Robert,

First off I wanted to let you know that responding via email includes your signature here so you're welcome to edit the post to remove that information if you wish. 

As far as what you're describing, that matches what Ali shared. If you're viewing published output on your desktop it can cause issues with local security or browser restrictions. Once you start moving that published output around to another folder or even outside of the published folder it's going to cause more of those issues. This is why we always recommend testing the published output by uploading it to the intended publish environment. So if you've published for Web - upload to a web server (there's a free testing one in the article Ali shared tempshare.articulate.com) and if you're publishing it for LMS, upload to your LMS (SCORM Cloud is a free, industry standard for testing). 

Browser security isn't getting any more lax either - for example Chrome recently disabled local playback of Flash content by default (not to worry! there is a way around it). But that's why we're strong supporters of testing it in an environment that's as close to final as possible - and that way you can also look at the course itself and ensure everything works as you'd expect before sharing it with others. 

Hope that helps and feel free to let us know if you need anything else! 

Thanks Ashley for the clarification, my signature line and dealing with my "techno-tardness" 

Ha! That's a new one Robert...I'll be sure to file "techno-tardness" away for future use. ;-)  And absolutely no worries. We're here to help.