Slide occasionally erroneously advances after clicking button. Any ideas why?

[Basla284119223x9v]

I'm updating an older course (I'm using Classic Captivate version 11.8.1 on a PC, but the file was probably created in 2017). There is one slide that has 18(!) click and reveal buttons, where you click a button with a topic heading and it reveals text about the topic. Each button uses an advanced action that hides all the other text on the slide and shows the text associated with the clicked button. I saw that many of the buttons were erroneously advancing to the next slide rather than revealing text. I looked at the advanced actions for them and saw that "continue" was one of the actions included, along with 17 "hide" text actions and one "show" text action. When I deleted "continue" that solved the problems for most of the buttons, but there are 2 buttons, right next to each other, that now (seemingly randomly) occasionally advance to the next slide when you click on them rather than revealing text. If you click the back button after the slide advances and click again, they function as they should.  There is definitely no "continue" in the advanced action script, and I couldn't see anything different about them and the buttons that work. Out of desperation I created entirely new advanced actions for them, with no luck. They still often advance to the next slide instead of revealing text, but if you click back to the slide and try the button again, then it (usually) works like it is supposed to. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[Lilybiri]

Please show some screenshots:

• Timeline panel of that slide, with one of the erroneous buttons selected.
• Preview window of the used advanced action. You find the Preview window using this button:
  
• Advanced Interaction panel (F9). Make sure the Success column width is increased to enable to see the used actions for the buttons.

I don't understand why Shared actions were not used, since you have so many duplicate advanced actons on one slide which can lead to choking Captivate.

[Basla284119223x9v]

Thank you! Here are the screenshots. I haven't used shared actions before, but I'll look into them. I inherited this file from someone who probably left the job years ago, but my guess is maybe they didn't know about shared actions either. Also, I was mistaken--it's not buttons, it's click boxes.

[Lilybiri]

You didn't extend the On Success column in the Advanced Interaction panel. 

So far I see:

• One button with a No action On Success.
• I see Continue as Failure action. Do those Click boxes have infinite attempts or not?
• I suspect that the advanced action is not complete, it has only Hide actions, shouldn't there be at least one Show action?  Anyway that person was not very competent. If you don't want to use a multistate object, which would have been much better, at least grouping should have been used to group all those text objects. So that you can hide the group, and show those individual elements that need to be shown.
• The click boxes had their pausing point taken out, I suspect the slide is paused only by that particular button. Does that button have Infinite attempts? Where is its pausing point?

I wanted to check if the Advanced actions On Success were labeled in a logical way, and that this label was unique.

Even the Captivate team never seemed to use Shared actions which is really frustrating when you know its power. I have a small course (and a lot of blog posts) about them. Here is a link to the Introduction to that course:

https://blog.lilybiri.com/who-is-afraid-of-dot-dot-dot-shared-actions-crash-course-introduction

[Basla284119223x9v]

Sorry about that! Here it is with the Success column expanded. In regard to your bullet points:

• Yes, there's one button on the slides, and it has "No Action on Success" selected. The purpose of the button is to stop the slide from advancing automatically. I included a screenshot of it below. Is that ok, or no?
• The click boxes with "Continue" on failure do have infinite attempts. Each of the advanced actions for the 18 click boxes, including the ones that aren't working right, has one "show" action and 17 "hide" actions (but the "show" action is hard to see because there are soooooo many "hide" actions).
• Yes, I think you are right that the slide is only paused by that button, which pauses after .1 second, and it has infinite attempts. Is that as it should be?

Thanks for your help!

[Lilybiri]

Some more ideas, besides the tips you seem to have ignored about using grouping and shared actions.

• You didn't need that button, if you had kept the pausing points for the click boxes. But setting the pausing point so close to the first frame is dangerous, since that slide has tons of advanced actions. Keep the pausing point at least at the default 1.5 seconds. I would have kept the pausing points for the click boxes, because now you ad another interactive object.
• The click boxes are very close to each other, which means that clicking if not so precise could lead to problems. Why didn't you use the green shapes as buttons instead of putting click boxes over an image? Please shrink those boxes a little bit.
• If you group all the captions, you would need only a simple shared action with two parameters:    
      Hide Group
      Show  Textx

            I marked the paramters in Bold Italic. That one shared action could replace the 19 duplicate actions.
            Chances for choking Captivate would be decreased a lot.

However the almost touching click boxes do worry me as well.