Ending support of public folder

I was just gonna use Dropbox to support a mobile app I'm developing since they offer really good API.

I've found out that they're closing public folders with no obvious reason nevertheless so many people use it, even pay for. So obviously ignore their own customers.

I recognized it's not such a great idea to rely on cloud. App developers cannot take such a great risk that one day his app stops working because cloud provider decided to shut down key functionalities. It's better to use own server whenever possible.

Please do reconsider removing the currently-active links to the Public folder items. 
 
Your service has been vital to our business and family and removing these links will create a hardship..

Thanks.

CW
A paying, happy user

I have links to a thousand files that are in my Public Folder all over the Internet, from forums to blog posts. Do you seriously consider me tracking down years worth on my Internet activity to 'replace' these links a reasonable course of action?

I wish upon you a slow and painful bankrupcy if you do this.

abela wrote:

Vast majority of comments here seem to be along the lines of "i have posted links to images/videos on forums and now they will break."

 

So, basically Dropbox does not want to be everybodies CDN anymore.

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But that's what I'm paying them for; It is a sharing and collaboration tool. Is it not?

If it was just for file backups, I would be using backblaze at half the cost and unlimited storage.

This functionality was and is the only reason I use Dropbox. If your intent was to push people away, congratulations.

I'm off to go buid my own Seafile server now, thanks, where I control the whole thing. I think I'd have been better off tossing things up on S3 instead, all these years.

+1.  Please reconsider, Dropbox.  At least give us a way to keep existing public links active without having to recreate and replace them...

Does anyone in the dropbox see all this here?

Friends do not stop sending emails to the support, making it clear that this is horrible!

For those who are confused about what dl=0 and 1 is:

At the very end of a Dropbox link there'll be a 0. Change that to a 1 and it'll be a direct download instead of a download page, similar to how the old public folder links work.

Also for those who think they have to visit Dropbox.com to create links:

This is not the case if you have the app installed. Right clicking the file or folder you want to create a link to and choosing copy Dropbox link will create a link and copy it to your clipboard. You only have to visit the site if you want to set or modify link options or remove the link altogether.

That said, I'm not a huge user of public folder links, but I too disagree with this change and don't understand why there hasn't been any disclosure about the reason. All this importance placed on disclosure about government requests for data, and none about changes like this. A lot of the negative criticism comes from people not knowing anything about why this is being done.

I had no idea people still used that folder.

I hated it.

The second they announced sharable links throughout dropbox I stopped using it.

I guess a good compromise might be to either allow existing links to function, but make all future files private and require you to generate a share link; or allow it for pro users, if it's costing them to maintain it.

I'm a pro user and don't care either way. I'm honestly surprised people still use it.

You can still create those links - just need to change the hostname to get a direct link instead of the HTML page.

Create a regular shared link to an image; you'll get a URL that looks like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ynzjfwe0lfdlr2e/cat.jpg?dl=0

Then, replace "www.dropbox.com" with "dl.dropboxusercontent.com", and you have:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/ynzjfwe0lfdlr2e/cat.jpg?dl=0

You can then use it in [img] codes and so on.