Ending support of public folder

[ae2rigc]

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?

[Delta128m]

As a followup to my earlier post to urge Dropbox to reconsider, as if they care at all. This weekend will be spent notifying and alerting other casual users that might not realize this is happening soon and to start the migration to other cloud services and leave Dropbox. Posted shared files on several forum are locked once done, stayed and are read for months & years by others - it's easy to change the URL and links on my end; not as simple nor practical to go back to - i.e. 2011 post - to update or say "oops" go from link xxx to link yyyy-0 instead because of Dropbox. If all of us need to do all these & migrate in 6 months or a year's time - based on yesterday's email notice, we might as well START going to stop using Dropbox and go to other alternatives ... with virtually unlimited cloud storage, more workarounds to house it for public sharing & access. This is an unpopular, unacceptable change and breaching the faith & trust we placed for many years with Dropbox - not wise, not good, foolish and it is going to backfire & send many of us running, moving our accounts elsewhere. No more upload and time to close Dropbox - going to start tweeting all my contacts & I urge other users to do it plus FB posting.

[Gendo]

I agree with @narikaa.

We're told that Dropbox will have better sharing options as a result of disabling links.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  I've used Dropbox for years, mainly to embed images in many educational and non-profit org sites.  It sounds like, as a result of this change, I will have to update perhaps hundreds of links, representing a huge waste of my time.  And, as a Pro user, I get to pay for this inconvenience.  😞

[cdgoin]

If you kill public folders you destroy a millions or more posts on forums across the internet. You make tons of them useless. MOST of the forums that we host pictures from your service on do not allow us to edit the links. So effectively you will kill years of information. Please at least keep the links to the images and such active. Lock the folder and keep the data that is there and the links that are there live for the benefit of the internet and community forums world wide. PLEASE at least grandfather the old links. LOCK the public folder from adding or deleting or modification of any sort ( to keep dropbox secure ) but allow the links to stay as they are. Even if I wanted too I CANT go back and edit 7 years of posts and fix all the links I simply could not do that. 

[jsbovee]

I'm a lowly school teacher who for over five years have used the Public Folder to host thousands of links to homework assignments on numerous web pages for all my classes.  Moreover, as the legislative chair for a state-wide professional organization in Florida, I've done the same on a number of blogs for our members.  Like others who have expressed frustration with this news, I can't see how there is ANY way that I can easily repair the damage that will take place next September.  I was debating whether or not to take an early retirement from teaching this year and I think this news has sealed my fate.  I can't imagine being able to recreate the thousands of hyperlinks I've made over the years to my documents and I expressly purchased DROPBOX PRO to be able to add ALL of my material which I've collected over the last twenty years for the very purpose of easily sharing them with colleagues and students.  

Please do NOT break faith with your customers over this idea!  And, if things are so easily done with your newer and more improved features, I suggest you upload some files to YOU-TUBE illustrating how easily PUBLIC FOLDER contents can be now shared without having to RELINK all the files.  For your tens of thousands of non-techies, this would be the least you could do to allay our fears.  

Jack Bovee

[cdgoin]

You say your keeping the public box and its information but blocking the old links.

Thats unacceptable, if you kill public folders you destroy a million or more posts on forums across the internet. You make tons of them useless. MANY of the forums that we host pictures from your service are do not allow us to edit the links. So effectively you will kill years of information. Please at least keep the links to the images and such active. Lock the folder and keep the data that is there and the links that are there live for the benefit of the internet and community forums world wide.

90% of my posts on many car forums from opelgt.com to fiatspider.com to name a few will be useless and have no images. I also will not be able to edit the links to the important threads as I am not allowed to edit posts after 24 hours. If I have to redo and rebuild all my build threads it will take hundreds of hours and I will only be able to recover the "good ones" as there are too many to count. 

May I suggest a middle ground. LOCK the public folders down. Nothing in and nothing new to be edited. It will be secure that way. The information will simply be locked. The links will continue to work so no one needing this information will lose it. 

Changing the rules is fine, but deleting something millions have relied on ( and I mean everyone from the users to those that read our blogs, tech sites, etc.. ) is just a very poor idea. 

From the comments on post : 

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Don-t-kill-Public-folders/idi-p/198003#.WFPomQl4uGM.facebook

I am not alone in this. 

[frod]

Just wanted to echo the sentiments of everyone who is disappointed. I don't like the extra effort to create a link outside my public folder, vs. just dropping it in there. I agree it's been coming, and it's why I've wound down my use of dropbox, this will end it permanently for me.

[crpaiva]

I'm very scared by this news from Dropbox. Closing the Public folder will impact more than 300 links in the structure of more than 5 of my blogs !! Can you imagine the work we're going to have to rewrite all addresses? There is no tool that can perform this action automatically. I look forward to DropBox reviewing this action.

[DiPersiaTech]

+1000.  I'm sure there's a good business reason for this, but this is going to hurt a LOT of folks.

[cjm1982]

Agree 100%.  Dropbox, listen to your users or you will go down the toilet!!  I use the public folder for serving images to a few small websites.  So much easier than dealing with an FTP server.

Dropbox seems to favor going backwards - by having tunnel vision of what their service "should" do in their eyes and arrogantly disregarding its paying subscribers.  A large share of users do not use it as a file collaboration, which seems to be the "only" use-case that Dropbox can vision.  I think a large share of users simply use it for sharing files in more of a one-way context.

When other tech companies change their functionality, they at least offer improved features.  Dropbox continuously just force-feeds us, and "tells" us what we are supposed to use Dropbox for.

Bad Dropbox, just bad.

[Alexis G.1]

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@Mark wrote:
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.

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Mitigate damage? How?. I have 500+ images shared in public forums thanks to Public Folders in Dropbox. I absolutely agree with previous commenters. I don't have hours or days locating all my posts in all the forums where I have subscriptions and posts.

It's a shame Dropbox will remove such a great function of the application. Not a good thing for sure.