I made a mod that adds dialogue lines that can be spoken by almost everyone in Skyrim after the player selects a certain prompt (i.e. just some regular dialogue; player says something and NPC responds). Everything seemed to be working just fine without any issues until recently when a user of my mod mentioned that they had experienced a random encounter with a thief in the wilderness. They used the persuade dialogue and succeeded. The thief spoke the usual dialogue, but then followed that line with a line of dialogue from my mod, without any extra prompt from the player. I was baffled because my mod doesn't touch this quest at all. However, I verified the user's findings myself, which was quite a shock to me. I looked into the random encounter quest in the Creation Kit (WERJ02) and found that the dialogue has "Invisible Continue" checked. After looking at what this does, I wonder if this could be the problem.

My questions are: Am I correct in identifying the reason for the issue, or does the reason lie elsewhere? Is there anything that I can do on my end to prevent this issue?

Any help is really appreciated.

"Invisible Continue" simply means the dialogue line continues without prompt from the player. This is useful for if you want dialogue line A to be said, then immediately be followed (Without input from the player) by either line B or C depending on X conditions. A great example of this is acknowledging the player's gender. For example:

Line A is selected by the player:

[Player] Hello my friend!

[NPC] Greetings! What brings you here today?

Then you want the NPC to say one of two lines, one for a male player, one for a female. Without invisible continue, the dialogue menu would pop up and the player would have to select something. This can be odd, as the response is forced and the player pointlessly has to click an option. However, with invisible continue checked, the quest picks one of the two lines then hooks it seemlessly with the last. Thus, a male character experiences this:

[Player] Hello my friend!

[NPC] Greetings! What brings you here today? I'm always happy to see another adventurous lad looking to buy some gear!

There is nothing in between. The dialogue lines 'continue invisibly'.

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As such, I do not believe this is the source of your problem. Instead, look at what the 'Invisible Continue' marked line is hooked to. Somehow it's hooking to your dialogue, and going to it, instead of the intended vanilla dialogue.

Thanks for the response. The reason that I suspected that that might be the problem is because there are no infos listed under "Link To". CreationKit.com mentions "if there are no Topics in this list, or none of the Topics have a valid Info, the Actor's top-level Topic List will be displayed" and my mod's dialogue happens to be top-level. In fact, another user of my mod reported similar issues, but the unwanted dialogue being triggered was from another mod, which makes me suspect "Invisible Continue" as the culprit in both cases. Anyway, before reading your post, in an act of desperation, I just unchecked "Invisible Continue" in the thief's dialogue, and it seems to have worked.