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Re: Warning about shared hotlinks

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

sladdaren
Helpful | Level 6
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I have re-linked the most of my files, only took about a Week 24/7 every day :(. But i have a lot of users on my site that dont have that energy to spend time to relink there files. I have told many of my users in 10 years time that Dropbox is the greatest way of showing files on the site. Now i have deleted all the links to dropbox in my forum threads. 

I still hope that one of the site builders of Dropbox or someone in charged reading this 54 pages long thread and change back to its former function..We want our files to keep showing!. I know you can fix it and it would be the right thing to do. 

I never going to post a single file again on DB. The trust is down from 10 to 0 this week. But for my users on my site i hope the files come back..

awolff
Helpful | Level 6
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How do you know whether *any* of the available cloud storage services can be trusted? The terms and conditions of any of them are similar to you sleeping on somebody's couch or renting somebody's spare bedroom. They can change the rules and conditions anytime and there is not much you can do about it. The only way you can get around those restrictions is to rent your own apartment or house. That gives you certain rights and liberties as a tenant.

 

I have gotten around that by renting a virtual private server(VPS) so I can determine what sort of files to store and how to store and the link to them. Surprisingly, the cost is not much more than merely renting space from Dropbox. As long as I don't break any laws, I can pretty much store and link to any file-type I want. I not only get file storage, but I get email servers and web servers for as many websites and mail accounts I want to have. I also have to pay for Domain Names from a registrar.

jelabarre
Helpful | Level 6
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So *****NOW***** what am I supposed to do for posting my resume???? As usual, yet *****ANOTHER***** company decides to make themselves totally WORTHLESS. I have NO desire to have to make a "shared link" for EACH AND EVERY email I send out to a recruiter, that would double or triple the time it takes to send out a reply.

So what would you suggest as a USEFUL company to do business with????

Rich
Super User II
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jelabarre wrote:
I have NO desire to have to make a "shared link" for EACH AND EVERY email I send out to a recruiter

Why would you need to? Create one link and use the same one each time.

SolitareLee
Helpful | Level 6
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You don't send the same resume to multiple companies, dude. Generally speaking, you customize them for each, the cover page at the absolute least, but generally the contents as well, to emphasize for whatever position you're applying for. One blanket resume isn't considered acceptable these days. 

 

Hell, I'm a *trucker* and I still have to do unique resumes. 

jelabarre
Helpful | Level 6
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@SolitareLee wrote:

You don't send the same resume to multiple companies, dude. Generally speaking, you customize them for each, the cover page at the absolute least, but generally the contents as well, to emphasize for whatever position you're applying for. One blanket resume isn't considered acceptable these days. 

 

Hell, I'm a *trucker* and I still have to do unique resumes. 


That would require companies to actually put identifyable information on their listings.  In the IT field I find pretty much EVERY listing is obfuscated behind layers of contracting companies, recruiters, and outright vague and/or unrealistic job descriptions.  Customization would require knowing what/where the job is, and NO ONE wants to provide that level of information anymore.

 

(Why is it, with all the resources we have on the web, information has gotten worse, not better?  Too much noise, not much signal at all)

Photo O.
Collaborator | Level 9
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I am now having another problem with shared links.

 

I use shared links to create sports competititon tables (in the form of png or jpg files) which are hotlinked in the headers of a number of sports forums. When I used the Public Folder, it was a simple matter of overwriting the linked file e.g. sports_table.jpg with the updated file, and the hotilinks would automaticaly update to the new table.

 

However, what has sometimes been happening recently is that, when I update the file, the shared link URL for that file changes! This means the embedded link in the forum headers are no longer valid links, and the tables no longer display.

 

This state of affairs is intolerable. A solution that worked 100% reliably before has been buggered up by Dropbox "improvements". I'm not happy, I am going to have to find a solution other than Dropbox if this situation is not resolved really soon.

 

There needs to be a way to manually edit the URL of a Dropbox link so that I can make it exactly the same as all the existing links "in the wild". 

 

ETA: I have figured out what is causing this problem. Note, this is VERY IMPORTANT if you are doing sometihng like I am doing, which is regularly updating a linked image. Read the following carefully

 

If you share a linked image in Dropbox, so long as the image always exists in the same location you can Right Click > Copy Dropbox Link as many times as you like, and it will ALWAYS result in the same shared URL, BUT if you delete the file,  the link is immediately deleted, and even if you then put a file with exaclty the same filename in the same location, and Right Click > Copy Dropbox Link, it will create a different shared URL, and all your hotlinks will be broken

 

Dropbox needs to address and repair this bug. This behaviour is completely diffeent from how things worked with the Public Folder, which always created the same URL for the same filename.

 

So, until this issue is addressed (if it ever is) it is very important that you....

 

NEVER DELETE A SHARED FILE IF YOU EXPECT TO RESTORE THE SAME FILE WITH THE SAME LINK URL

 

I offer Dropbox  some possible solutions to this problem

 

1. Allow users to edit the "random charater string" of the URL of their linked files to restore accidentally deleted links.

2. Set up their algorithm so that a file with the exact same name, in the exact same location ALWAYS has the exact same URL

3. Allow links to exist for 24 hours after a file is deleted so that a replacement file will "pick up" the shared link

Photo O.
Collaborator | Level 9
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accidental duplicate

Rich
Super User II
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Photo O. wrote:

Dropbox needs to address and repair this bug. I offer Dropbox  some possible solutions to this problem


There's nothing to fix. It is working as designed.

Photo O.
Collaborator | Level 9
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Yep, this no more that we have come to expect here... more Dropbox apologists spouting the standard BS; "its not a bug, its a feature"  rhetoric.

 

If that is how it is designed to work, then the design is crap and the designers are too ignorant to understand the problem. You could have the same link in 100 different places over the internet. If the linked file gets accientally deleted, there is no way back, and that is 100 web pages that need to be edited to fix it.  And for "accdentally deleted" you should read "lost by Dropbox"... that has happened to me more than once too!!

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