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Forum Discussion
ae2rigc
9 years agoNew member | Level 2
Ending support of public folder
Just heard from dropbox that support for the public folder is ending.
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As a result, we’ll soon be ending support for the Public folder. Dropbox Pro users will be able to use the Public folder until
September 1, 2017. After that date the files in your Public folder will become private, and links to these files will be deactivated. Your files will remain safe in Dropbox.
If you’d like to keep sharing files in your Public folder, you can create new shared links. Just make sure to send the new URLs to your collaborators.
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It is one of the most useful features of the service for me as I use it to get links to single files that I can send to people without setting up shared folders and requiring them to have dropbox accounts.
(Save file to my public folder locally, syncs, right click, get publick link, paste. Doesn't get any easier than that.)
It's also useful for bb style forum posts where you can link to images with an easy tag.
With the public folder support being removed, is there going to be an alternative solution to allow easy public sharing of single files?
- LGM - the issue is that people are abusing it and causing issues for everybody by getting the Dropbox domains blacklisted which cause emails to fail and downloads to be blocked by firewalls etc.
In terms of changing the extension, sorry, no idea how you would do that!
659 Replies
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- NFAToys9 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Well thank you Dropbox for changing the rules after the game started. It looks like come September 2017 I'll be dropping Dropbox since you no longer will let me have the Public Folder I signed up for when I subscribed many years ago. I have years of public links in thousands of posts to dozens of web forums that link to pictures and short videos in my public folder. With one broad arbitrary decission, and without asking your paying custoers how it will effect them, you've negated my only reason for being a Dropbox customer. And you have not provided any workable option for myself and the others on this forum who you have placed in the same boat. I can't begin to describe how angry I am right now for this brain dead decision you have forced down our throats.
- miclevine9 years agoNew member | Level 2
Same here - we have 100s of links thoughout a few websites to content on Dropbox in the Public folder. Can you PLEASE not remove the public folder? Or at least let the existing links still function?
This could takes hours and hours of work, and we'd still leave some holes. Please Dropbox, reconsider or find another solution!
- Alexander B.209 years agoHelpful | Level 5
I absolutely agree with the previous commenters. A lot of people used public links to post images to forums, mostly small ones, which do not provide built-in storage for images and attachments.
On our local community forum I've posted hundreds of such images and advised other users to use Dropbox for this purpose as well. This content is still useful and the loss of it will be a major problem for all our users.
I think Dropbox should rethink this decision and at least preserve existing public links as is. Otherwise, on 09/01/2017, many communities on the web will suffer from losing years of users' contributions.
- Mark9 years ago
Super User II
Just as an aside this news is about 4 months old now (not sure why its suddenly gone out on emails to some again today) and as such they've staunchly refused to change it - same as when they dropped XP support etc.
I know it isnt what people want to hear, sorry, but would rather you had the right information now - that is this wont change so you need to start thinking about ways to mitigate the damage now. - narikaa9 years agoHelpful | Level 7Well you can and you cant. What has been suggested is an onerous MANUAL work-around onerously amending each link by link, NOT a means of automatically obtaining a 'correct' link using Dropbox.
- h0ndre9 years agoExplorer | Level 4
If this is true than there will be a lot of x-es instead of images on forums that I used in past years. I hope those x-es can be translated to "Courtesy of stupid ignorant decision of Dropbox".
- Alexander B.209 years agoHelpful | Level 5
I received the email with this news today for the first time.
- Pablo f.69 years agoHelpful | Level 7This explains when the function stopped working some time ago they were testing how it would be and it was terrible I will cancel my subscription
- Pablo f.69 years agoHelpful | Level 7Let's get organized and cancel these subscriptions
- LGM9 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Mark a écrit :
I know it isnt what people want to hear, sorry, but would rather you had the right information now - that is this wont change so you need to start thinking about ways to mitigate the damage now.I've been using dropbox hosting for years.
It was great service, and I used it for free since I didn't need any "pro" feature so I should not complain.
Let's find a workaround.
(Unfortunately Dropbox doesn't seem to use the Automation and Services like it should .. I can't find a way to create an automated "Create public link" service for the moment .. will keep looking into this tomorrow).
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