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Re: Directlinking

Ending support of public folder

ae2rigc
New member | Level 2
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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?

659 Replies 659

Rich
Super User II
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@Chris R.

 

Just to be clear... I'm a user, like you. I don't work for Dropbox.

 

@Dima

 

That made my day! Thank you! 🙂

gbm
Collaborator | Level 9
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Dropbox can stop the posts here, but not the thousands that will proliferate through the web once links start failing.

Someone at Dropbox has made a BIG mistake!

Stefen H.
Collaborator | Level 8
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I shall attempt to be the voice of reason here. Is it right for Dropbox to keep their customers in the dark regarding why they're removing support for the public folder? Probably not. All they're doing is angering customers and potentially driving them away. Is it right for customers to violate the community guidelines and spam everyone else with posts of protest? Absolutely not. Being angry and wishing to protest a change doesn't give anyone the right to violate rules. If one shouldn't break the laws where one lives, logic dictates that one shouldn't violate community laws online either. If people want to protest, spamming the forum is not the right way to go about it. I myself was rather annoyed that my e-mail inbox was filled with repeat posts. I subscribed to this topic to keep an eye on what people were saying about the change, not to be spammed with repeat posts. Also, please try to keep in mind that the people running the forum probably have nothing to do with the change. They manage the forum and that's all, so they're probably in the dark just like us normal users are. All they're doing is trying to enforce the guidelines. Getting an attitude with them won't help anyone. I realize that people are angry and are lashing out at anyone who may have anything to do with Dropbox, but it won't do anyone any good at all.

SolitareLee
Helpful | Level 6
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What *will* do any good, though? At every step along the way, customers have done everything Dropbox said to do. Complied with their demands, jumped through their hoops, tried again and again and again to get answers by following the instructions given. For their troubles, they were censored, silenced, and even had their posts *edited so that it appeared they said something they did not*. 

 

People's livelihoods are being wrecked here. Some people are losing thousands of hours of work, some people are losing things that *can literally never be recovered thanks to Dropbox's actions.* This is costing real people real money. Of course people are going to get angry. And people are at the end of their ropes because they've been behaving for three months, only to be completely and totally ignored. If Dropbox is doing absolutely nothing, and if the moderators here--whether they work for Dropbox or not--are behaving in inappropriate and shady ways, what would you suggest people do? I'm not running around posting that stuff everywhere here, but I'm also not comfortable condemning his actions either, since people have tried everything else already. 

 

If you're annoyed at getting spammed (I personally receieved a grand total of like 5 e-mails so it wasn't exactly a huge inconvenience on my part), you could just change your e-mail subscriptions accordingly. No reason to bother now; it's clear he's been banned. 

Server_Align
Collaborator | Level 10
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Heres what you do.......

 

Speak with your wallets, we just dropped DfB compacting what we might still want into one account and dropping it to PRO.

 

So they just lost $65 a month from us alone. Imagine how they might take notice if many others followed suit.

 

If your using a free account..... well cant say much more than "you get what you pay for" 😕

 

gbm
Collaborator | Level 9
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Free users used to get more, but now will get what they paid for - ZERO. 

 

On the otehr hand, Dropbox will BENEFIT. They will get TONS of bad publicity when all those links fail. Believe me, those of us who have used the Public folder will let the world know the cause of all those dead links.

awolff
Helpful | Level 6
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Keeping any critical data anywhere in the cloud always has certain risks. Dropbox is and has been useful to me to the extent worth paying for, because of the public folder. Now that Dropbox has stupidly decided to eliminate that, I will stop paying them and just use the free Service for backups and file exchange.

When you use a free cloud service, it is like sleeping on somebody else's couch rather than renting your own apartment. Dropbox decided to treat even their paying users like unwelcome guest in their fiefdom. For not too much more money than what Dropbox charges paid users, I was able to rent my own virtual apartment in cyberspace. Now I can make my own websites and store files in any format I care to choose, including HTML. I also get my own email storage and servers.

Chris R.
Collaborator | Level 10
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@Stefen H. wrote:
I shall attempt to be the voice of reason here. Is it right for Dropbox to keep their customers in the dark regarding why they're removing support for the public folder? Probably not. All they're doing is angering customers and potentially driving them away. Is it right for customers to violate the community guidelines and spam everyone else with posts of protest? Absolutely not. Being angry and wishing to protest a change doesn't give anyone the right to violate rules. If one shouldn't break the laws where one lives, logic dictates that one shouldn't violate community laws online either. If people want to protest, spamming the forum is not the right way to go about it. I myself was rather annoyed that my e-mail inbox was filled with repeat posts. I subscribed to this topic to keep an eye on what people were saying about the change, not to be spammed with repeat posts. Also, please try to keep in mind that the people running the forum probably have nothing to do with the change. They manage the forum and that's all, so they're probably in the dark just like us normal users are. All they're doing is trying to enforce the guidelines. Getting an attitude with them won't help anyone. I realize that people are angry and are lashing out at anyone who may have anything to do with Dropbox, but it won't do anyone any good at all.

I do regret unwittingly annoying users like yourself by causing them to receive unwanted emails. However, I'd like to explain just WHY I did that. Dropbox have, ever since this issue became an issue in the forums many many weeks ago, been removing new posts about it, and 'rolling them' into this one large topic. In this way, I presume, they hoped to adopt a kind of censorship, and hide the issue from people like yourselves (though you personally had subscribed to this topic). I was trying to bring this to a wider audience - the users who are unknowingly the subjects of Dropbox attempts at censorship.

 

As for this forum being 'the wrong place' and 'the wrong people' to protest to, it is the official Dropbox forum. The only other recourse is to raise a ticket about it and be replied to 1-to-1 via email response. If you read back in this long topic (which by its length puts people off even dipping into it, which is exactly what the Dropbox censors want) you will find somewhere where I posted the entire transcript of an email exchange I had with one of their employees. Their response, which sounds superficially moderate and sympathetic much like the superficially pleasant and moderate tone of "Ed" here, is full of bland corporate non-communication : whenever pressed about the upcoming 'dead links' issue, they smoothly slide around the question and repeat the bland corporate line. That's what has made us so angry, and hence my response yesterday. Dropbox are deservedly reaping what they have sowed.

 

Chris R.
Collaborator | Level 10
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"Just to be clear... I'm a user, like you. I don't work for Dropbox."

Yeah? So where did the "Super User" label come from then? And why do you leap in to defend Dropbox at every opportunity?

Rich
Super User II
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Chris R. wrote:

Dropbox have ... been removing new posts about it, and 'rolling them' into this one large topic. In this way, I presume, they hoped to adopt a kind of censorship


It isn't Dropbox that's been doing that. It's been people like me, Mark and other Super Users, and in one case yesterday, the automated spam filters (see my reply above). A Dropboxer or two may have done some as well, but it's been mostly the Super Users.

 

Yeah? So where did the "Super User" label come from then?

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And why do you leap in to defend Dropbox at every opportunity?

I'm here to help moderate the forums. That means keeping threads on topic and moving irrelevant replies to the proper threads or, in some cases, removing all the spam and the spammers. As mentioned previously, the forums, while provided by Dropbox, are primarily user supported. A Dropboxer does reply on occasion and (finally!) more frequently with the rollout of the new forum platform, but they are still meant as a user to user support method. Causing a scene here will not draw the attention of Dropbox; at least not the attention you're looking for. The developers typically do not participate here. The decision makers do not participate here. They do receive the feedback that you leave here, though. So, keep up the fight, so to speak, about removing the links. Just keeps the threads on-topic and stop spamming the site, and everything will be fine. I can tell you from experience that one, massive, thread such as this one is more effective than spamming 20-30 unrelated posts. Dropbox DOES hear you. They just rarely, if ever, respond publicly.

 

As for defending their decision... I'm not. I'm just as upset about the removal of existing links and I've made that known to my contact within Dropbox (that's @Ed, from above, by the way). Dropbox knows my opinion on the matter so I see no reason to continuously post about it here. What I am defending, well, not defending but in agreement with, is the removal of the feature that creates the links. It's was deprecated in 2012 and replaced with a better system that allowed linking from anywhere in your account. The Public Folder is a relic that is no longer needed and served to cause confusion for new accounts that were looking for the feature.

 

So, back to the subject at hand... Public Folder... scrap it, sure, but the existing links should remain. Discuss it. Vent about it. Yell at me about it all you want if it helps (I can take it). Just keep things polite, on topic and in the appropriate place. Oh, and keep the language clean, please.

 

Thank you.

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