Blank menus lead to confusion

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ErikJon
Posts: 431
Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 11:24 pm

Blank menus lead to confusion

Post by ErikJon »

I have about 200 modules or more that have only one topic in each! You know; like an essay or a sermon, for example. The other day I was reading one called "Popular Excuses to Avoid Salvation, by D. L. Moody," which was just a long sermon of several pages, from 1875, but it seemed somewhat useful as a reference-work on evangelism, for the sake of its main points.

In many cases a module like that has only one topic, and since neither the module creator nor the end-user sees any need to create a title for that one long topic, it never gets done, and it remains blank for all posterity. In other words, there is absolutely nothing visible in the topic tree at all.

However, if there is nothing visible in the topic tree, then neither is there anything visible in the drop-down menu that appears after the user clicks on "Click here to see a list of topics for module..." Tell me this, how is a blank drop-down menu going to be of any help to a new user? There is no text visible to him at all until he clicks on a topic, and since there will be no topics in view, he is really in the dark at this point.

There are lots of blank menus floating around TheWord, and a new user--and even an experienced user--will sometimes not know where to go from there; the menus look blank, although they may really contain only one unnamed hidden topic.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

TW should generate a title automatically for any blank topic in any module, or else to the only topic available, wherever a module has only one topic in it. Something like "Untitled topic" would be sufficient, I guess. In this way, the one untitled topic will no longer be invisible, and it will be evident to any user that there was always one hidden topic inside the module, all along, and he will know where to click, in order to see some of the module text.

Some modules have two or three hidden topics, and a handful of visible topics. I think it would be good to have all invisible topics assigned an automatic "untitled" title, for the same reason.

Meanwhile, I suggest that TW automatically open the side-topic-tree, every time any book module is opened for the fist time, so that the user can see his table of contents at all times. This may possibly be helpful to new users, more so than "Click here to see a list of topics". However, I think that the automatic opening of the topic tree should be easily be enabled or disabled in the preferences.
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I'm an Independent Baptist running TheWord portable v 5.0.0.1481 from an external 500GB hard drive with over 1,900 modules installed and loaded in my current module set. I'm using 32-bit Vista Ultimate SP1 with a 2.7gHz processor and 4GB RAM.
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JG
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Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2008 8:34 pm

Re: Blank menus lead to confusion

Post by JG »

The solution is to fix the module.
Jon
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csterg
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Re: Blank menus lead to confusion

Post by csterg »

I agree with Jon; this is really a corner case and the module creator should fix that.
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