Ending support of public folder

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Mark wrote:
And the issue isnt the BB links. Its the fact Public folders can host HTML pages at present. They've also been a depreciated feature now for many years. Its hardly an unexpected move

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This is wrong, public folder support for hosting web pages was already removed a while ago.

There is no technical reason that links web hosting and individual file hosting on dropbox. One of my uses for dropbox was to host forum images and videos. Now all those links will be broken. 

This is a greedy customer hostile move that will cost far more in bad publicity than you can even begin to imagine. I'm moving back to a web host like nearlyfreespeech on my own domain so this can never happen again. 

Hello

It seems XML files only feed properly out of PUBLIC directory.

Is there any way to feed XML out of other directories. When shared in another directory an XML

file feeds as a webpage and doesn't work like it did from PUBLIC directory.

Is there any solution to this?

many thanks

RIVER..

We understand our sharing options and the changes to the link formatting. That is not the issue. 

The issue is you want us to go back and update millions of links.

DropBox is acting like we bookmark every post we ever made, or even have access to anymore. Then we can "JUST" go fix the posts with new links.. THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. 

THIS CAN NOT HAPPEN EVEN IF WE WANTED TOO,

IN MANY CASES WE NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO THE OLD POSTS TO EVEN EDIT THE LINKS.

Then even if we do have access to the post to edit it, we simply do not have time to hunt down 5 years worth of posts to fix them all. 

So, from car forums, home schooling forums, knitting forums, rescue squad forums, you name it, valuable data will be essentially destroyed. Understand from hobbies to work related issues, these forums cover the gambit of social media. All of them will now lose years of valuable information and "value" themselves, they will all look at Dropbox as the one that has destroyed their information and will leave for other services. This ends up with fewer end users for you and all of them speaking bad about your business, that is not a way to increase your value. It IS a way to lose value and respect across the internet.

Some of us have contributed to thousands of posts scattered across these multiple forums using dropbox to host the images and information in them. One other thing to consider is many forum contributors in many of these same forums over the last 5 years have passed. They are the only ones that know these links exist and are the only ones that had some of the information they shared. You will be eliminating their contributions as well. 

This move is very similar to moves at MySpace.com, MP3.com, Geocities, Homestead, etc.. that ruined the value of a known service. They all lost their userbase and their value virtually overnight thanks to self-inflicted damage. All are now much smaller and worth much less, or got bought by competition for pennies on the dollar and shut down.

Yes change the system., make it more secure. Make people use the new more secure generated links. BUT DO NOT KILL ALL THE OLD ONES.. Thats what we are asking you too do. We don't need to know how to learn to create new links, we get how to do that. We DONT want to have to create NEW links for MILLIONS of OLD ones. 

Most of us can adjust to not having dropbox host the files like they used too and adjust to having to use new code for embedded files.

What we CAN NOT DO is fix all the OLD links to the OLD files that are scattered all over the internet.    

Wierdly DropBox seemed to have been canceling and rejected posts and deleting links to this thread. 

But now they are all back... ( Thus my duplicates ).

I guess River / DropBox didn't like being put to task.. 

I have written to a consumer programme on BBC Radio 4. Hopefully they will investigate and broadcast it, put a DB executive on air to squirm around the issues.

WAKE UP DROPBOX!!

[edit] Never mind, they don't listen to us anyway .. no more cloud hard drive for me. For the first time since 2011, I don't feel comfortable giving money to @dropbox. A consequence to their actions. Strike 1, Mrs Rice, Strike 2, 70m db leak, Strike 3, /public/. You're out. Sorry.

Whenever your data is on someone else's computer, it is subject to their rules. To get better control over your data and any links you might make to it, you have to at minimum rent your own server. This is the equivalent to renting your own apartment, rather than sleeping on somebody's couch. All users of cloud providers are not much different than someone sleeping on someone else's couch. They can show you the door anytime for any reason or no reason. Landlords usually won't throw you out if you pay your rent and otherwise behave yourself. That is what I did. I rented my own server. It turns out that this does not cost much more than a paying Dropbox account. Then you can make your own websites on your own domains and make that information public to the world. All the links you make will always work unless you screw them up yourself.

http://tech.thaivisa.com/dropbox-targets-deep-pocketed-businesses-to-increase-revenue/19617/?utm_source=tech-newsletter-20170201-1243&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=news

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jelabarre wrote:
I have NO desire to have to make a "shared link" for EACH AND EVERY email I send out to a recruiter

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Why would you need to? Create one link and use the same one each time.

You don't send the same resume to multiple companies, dude. Generally speaking, you customize them for each, the cover page at the absolute least, but generally the contents as well, to emphasize for whatever position you're applying for. One blanket resume isn't considered acceptable these days. 

Hell, I'm a *trucker* and I still have to do unique resumes. 

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SolitareLee wrote:

You don't send the same resume to multiple companies, dude. Generally speaking, you customize them for each, the cover page at the absolute least, but generally the contents as well, to emphasize for whatever position you're applying for. One blanket resume isn't considered acceptable these days. 

 

Hell, I'm a *trucker* and I still have to do unique resumes. 

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That would require companies to actually put identifyable information on their listings.  In the IT field I find pretty much EVERY listing is obfuscated behind layers of contracting companies, recruiters, and outright vague and/or unrealistic job descriptions.  Customization would require knowing what/where the job is, and NO ONE wants to provide that level of information anymore.

(Why is it, with all the resources we have on the web, information has gotten worse, not better?  Too much noise, not much signal at all)

I am now having another problem with shared links.

I use shared links to create sports competititon tables (in the form of png or jpg files) which are hotlinked in the headers of a number of sports forums. When I used the Public Folder, it was a simple matter of overwriting the linked file e.g. sports_table.jpg with the updated file, and the hotilinks would automaticaly update to the new table.

However, what has sometimes been happening recently is that, when I update the file, the shared link URL for that file changes! This means the embedded link in the forum headers are no longer valid links, and the tables no longer display.

This state of affairs is intolerable. A solution that worked 100% reliably before has been buggered up by Dropbox "improvements". I'm not happy, I am going to have to find a solution other than Dropbox if this situation is not resolved really soon.

There needs to be a way to manually edit the URL of a Dropbox link so that I can make it exactly the same as all the existing links "in the wild". 

ETA: I have figured out what is causing this problem. Note, this is VERY IMPORTANT if you are doing sometihng like I am doing, which is regularly updating a linked image. Read the following carefully

If you share a linked image in Dropbox, so long as the image always exists in the same location you can Right Click > Copy Dropbox Link as many times as you like, and it will ALWAYS result in the same shared URL, BUT if you delete the file,  the link is immediately deleted, and even if you then put a file with exaclty the same filename in the same location, and Right Click > Copy Dropbox Link, it will create a different shared URL, and all your hotlinks will be broken

Dropbox needs to address and repair this bug. This behaviour is completely diffeent from how things worked with the Public Folder, which always created the same URL for the same filename.

So, until this issue is addressed (if it ever is) it is very important that you....

NEVER DELETE A SHARED FILE IF YOU EXPECT TO RESTORE THE SAME FILE WITH THE SAME LINK URL

I offer Dropbox  some possible solutions to this problem

1. Allow users to edit the "random charater string" of the URL of their linked files to restore accidentally deleted links.

2. Set up their algorithm so that a file with the exact same name, in the exact same location ALWAYS has the exact same URL

3. Allow links to exist for 24 hours after a file is deleted so that a replacement file will "pick up" the shared link

SPAM post by iollivier2?

not really a spam .. but a valid and cheap solution to all of us .. I spent hours researching and testing services, as direct links feature works different on each service.

OK. The reason I asked is because I'm a SPAM Moderator on a forum and the syntax of your post is what I see frequently: First an innocuous phrase used to get by filters followed by the text of the advertisement.

I would have probably posted something like: "We've all been impacted by the closure of Public Folders by Dropbox. Due the the impact on my usage I went and researched possible viable alternatives, and concluded that this is best for me: ..."

I see. Thanks for your explonation. Will try next time to be more descriptive :)

OMG, I can not replace the link in the Public directory, please keep those links for me, so that my users can access it, so sad if my users can not access, Please :(

There should be a demonstration for this, a lot of my important stuff in the public folder, I'm really sad about Dropbox :(