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Referral sent to a friend marks as inelegible
Hi
I sent a request to a friend for them to install Dropbox. They followed all the process steps and were awarded 259mb. On my account against their referral email, it is marked as ineligible.
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- Hey Ranim Al-shakifi, thanks for joining the discussion here and happy Monday!
I just wanted to mention that when the recipient is ineligible for the referral program, there are two possible reasons:
One is that the recipient has already registered an account with Dropbox with that email address, or that the recipient is attempting to register using the same computer as you.
If you feel this status is inaccurate double-check the email address of your recipient to try again.
Nancy
Dropbox Community Moderator
Dropbox Community ModeratorHey GregP1! After your students sign up to Dropbox and follow these steps, you should both get the additional referral space to your Dropbox accounts.
From what I understand, your student installed the Dropbox app, signed in with her new Dropbox account, and she still hasn't received the extra space. Correct?
Also, to clarify, this is the first time she’s installed the Dropbox desktop app on that computer. Is this right?
Let me know and we’ll go from there.
The student in question came round for a lesson this afternoon, with her laptop.
I got her to verify her email address by following those steps. She received an error message, saying "Something went wrong... An unexpected error has occurred, but don't worry - your files are safe and our team has been notified."
She (and the rest of my three recent introductions are shown on my referrals page) are still shown as as: "Waiting for Install"
This simply reinforces my impression that the referral system simply does not work.
- Nancy
Thanks for giving that a go! In general, the “Waiting for Install” error message can also appear if the recipients of the referral haven’t logged in to their desktop app, after installing it on their computer.
If they’ve all signed in to their desktop apps with the credentials of their newly-created Dropbox accounts, and you still see this error, I can log a ticket for you and investigate this further.
Hi Nancy. Yes- my student downloaded, installed and logged into the desktop app, but is still seeing the error message. Please log a ticket for me? Thank you, Greg
- Nancy
Hey pink_light! Can you send me a few more details on what’s happened exactly on your end?
Hi - I assume that I should reply to Nancy with more details of this issue. (I'm not sure who "pink_light" is - another user encountering the same sort of issue?
The issue is as described earlier:
Using the referrals page on the website, I recommended Dropbox to one of my students, while she was here with her laptop, so I could see and make sure that everything was done right.
She had never installed or used Dropbox before. She was logged into a different network than me. She clicked on my referral link and successfully installed the App. However, she was listed on my Referrals Page as: "Waiting for Install"
She then came round for another lesson with her laptop. I got her to verify her email address by following the steps recommended by Nancy at 10:13pm on 27th October 2025. The student received an error message, saying "Something went wrong... An unexpected error has occurred, but don't worry - your files are safe and our team has been notified."
She (and the rest of my three recent introductions are still shown on my Referrals Page) as: "Waiting for Install"
Please can you sort this out?
Thank you,
Greg
- Nancy
Hi again, GregP1! In order to investigate this internally (since we don’t have any account visibility on the forum and I can’t see any details on your Dropbox account, or the referrals you’ve sent here), you’ll still need to reply back to the email I’ve sent you.
The only thing I want you to forward me via email is a screenshot of your “Refer a friend” page, and I’ll check a few things in our system to see what we can do.
