Forum Discussion
Trigger not launching email in LMS player
I developed a course that includes a hotspot. The learner is supposed to click on the hotspot which triggers a "send email to" action. The items work in review 360 but do not in the lms player (vi LMS). Any suggestions on how to get the trigger/hotspot to work?
3 Replies
Hi! The "Send email to" trigger works by asking the learner's computer to open its default email app. It doesn't send the email itself. So whether it works depends on the learner's machine and how your LMS loads the course. Most LMSs run the course inside a frame with tighter security than Review 360, and that can quietly block the email link.
I did some research on Articulate's site and here is what they recommends:
- Make sure the learner has a desktop email client like Outlook installed and set as their default email app.
- Try a different browser to see if browser security is the problem.
- Update to the latest version of Storyline 360 and republish.
- Check with your LMS admin about whether the course player blocks mailto links.
If it still won't open, a workaround that may work is replacing the trigger with "Execute JavaScript" and this code:
window.open("mailto:[email protected]?subject=Your%20Subject", "_blank");
No luck after all that? Send your .story file to Articulate Support so they can take a look. Hope this helps! 😊
Classic Review-vs-LMS split, and it's almost never the trigger itself. In Review 360 the course runs as a top-level page; in the LMS it usually sits inside an iframe, and LMS iframes are frequently sandboxed. A mailto: fired from inside a sandboxed frame gets silently swallowed — often with nothing in the browser console to show for it.
Two quick tests: publish the same file to a plain web server (not the LMS) — if the hotspot works there, the course is fine and the LMS frame is the culprit. Then ask your LMS admin whether content iframes carry sandbox attributes, and whether launching in a new window is an option. If the frame is non-negotiable, the reliable workaround is swapping the mailto for a simple contact-form page opened with a URL trigger.
In the course loaded in the LMS, does the button just not respond? I wonder if the developer console of the browser throws any errors when the button is clicked that might serve as clues to the underlying reason.
