Slide duration resetting itself to 160 seconds

Hi Rebecca

you're lucky my timeline number is 236 secs ;-)

I find it happens if:

• I copy an object from one slide/layer to another even if the timeline on both is much shorter
• Import slides from another SL file that contain an image

I'm just used to it now and use the Home Left arrow key combo to reduce it back but I agree it is very time consuming to fix and frustrating not to be able to isolate why or stop it from happening. 

I logged a ticket a while back and I understand it's with the QA team

Hi Rebecca,

We've also seen similar happen when using the "align to playhead" element that it'll extend the timeline. Just to confirm though, when you publish your course everything is fine when you first test it? And it's only after a period of time that this issue appears in the published output? When you open the .story file back up to republish do you see that the timeline was extended? 

Just looking to get a bit more information to confirm it's in line with the issue that Wendy mentioned. 

Hi Ashley,

Thank you for looking into this! Sorry I wasn’t really clear- yes, when we make changes to one of the eLearning modules (there are always little updates to our new starter Orientation on a regular basis), we always test the modules (or at least the section we made the changes to) in Preview mode before publishing and uploading to the LMS.

The next thing that happens in these situations is that we are informed about extended slide durations by concerned learners who think they are stuck, or that the Next button does not work. The weird thing is that it never is the slide that had changes made to it, instead it seems to be random other slides in the same module.

When I then open the unpublished .story file to check, I can see the extended duration and manually reduce it again before re-publishing.

That's why I started to think that the publishing process itself may introduce the problem... 

Thank you!

Thanks for clarifying Rebecca and that does sound odd. I know Wendy mentioned it's happening to her as well, but I'd also want to confirm that you're working on local project files and publishing to a local drive as detailed here. 

Thanks Ashley. I had a look at the link you provided. While we certainly do not save the files on USB devices, we do work on network drives in our organisation (and I would assume that the vast majority of organisations work that way to allow file sharing).

All of our documents and files are stored on network files, and we are actually warned by our IT to save things locally as they can be lost if the local machine breaks down, so it does not sound very practical to me… But I understand your point and we can monitor behaviour if we start saving on local hard drives only (and then copy over to the network drive).  It would be good to see if that makes a difference.

Wendy, are you always saving Articulate files locally, and it is still happening to you?

Thank you everyone!

Hi Rebecca

yes I always work locally and then save at increments to an external harddrive or dropbox.

Having said that, a lot of the work I do comes from clients who work in a networked environment so that could account for the issues I have with the timeline.

Thank you for confirming, Wendy. Good to know... sounds like we should give this a try. 

Hi Rebecca,

Backing up to a network drive is ok, it's just that you'll want to ensure folks download that file and work on it locally to prevent those issues. I know a lot of our team even uses services such as Dropbox or similar to back up files and when you're ready to edit them just download and open from your desktop for example and do the work there.

Hope that helps clarify and please feel free to keep us posted on how things go!