You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Ending support of public folder
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 Publ...
- LGM - the issue is that people are abusing it and causing issues for everybody by getting the Dropbox domains blacklisted which cause emails to fail and downloads to be blocked by firewalls etc.
In terms of changing the extension, sorry, no idea how you would do that!
Many have made comments as have I but here is my current position.
Share verses Create Public Link. Now that I understand how Share works, especially that you need to set dl=1 so they turn into direct links that forums can use, I can use Share as it stands. In fact other then needing to edit the dl=0 to dl=1 it doesn't really take that much more work. I do hope the app is update to support this directly from finder on the Mac or explorer on the PC.
Public folder being made private: I really don't care about this due to the way I use it and how share now works.
Breaking the existing Public file links. This is totally nuts due to the thousands of links in thousands of forums that are going to break and the fact that many forums will not let you edit old posts to fix the broken links. This is the one change that Dropbox SHOULD NOT DO AND SHOULD LEAVE AS IT IS!!!!! Making this change is a disservice to all of it's users.
It seems that not all understand the differences between a shared link within and outside the public folder.
They are not the same and in some applications there is an important difference.
You cannot create a link to a folder outside the public folder that allows editing of the file name.
I posted some material on another question on this forum - essentially it goes like this.
I wanted a folder of icons - lots of them.
I did not want to have to create a separate link for each. I am sufficiently long in the tooth DropBox wise to have a public folder (for the moment)
So, in my DropBox Public folder I have some icons
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2835140/GE/Images/rat.png
If you change the word rat for stoat or cat or Logo you get that icon directly - brilliant!
But in a non public folder, behaviour is very different!
For example a link created by 'copy public link' of a non public Dropbox file goes to the DropBox website
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i94pdbuvhwqsp6f/Traps.png?dl=0
Even if you change the end to ?dl=1 or remove the ?dl=... completely it does the same!
BUT if you change the front end a little to:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/i94pdbuvhwqsp6f/Traps.png
it will correctly render the png file in your browser or wherever you need it (eg in a google earth kml file)
However you cannot change the file name to get a different file in that folder. So:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/i94pdbuvhwqsp6f/TrapL.png
will give you the same image as .../Traps.png even though TrapL exists and is different. doooh!
To get that file I need to use this link
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/v1h6qd48zyogq3v/TrapL.png
which has a totally different code section, so it seems that the encoded bit points to the specific file!
This is/was a lovely feature of DropBox which I had used extensively for a predator trapping app using Google Earth. Now, to no avail it seems to be that they will withdraw this feature without concern for their huge database of users.
Yes I know it allows folder contents to be browsed - but that is the function of a public folder - right?
You don't put your tax declarations in there eh?
As my grandmother used to say "Jam and Butter the Muddy Bucket of Pitch"
Bob JordanB
Bob J. wrote:
It seems that not all understand the differences between a shared link within and outside the public folder.
They are not the same and in some applications there is an important difference.
For example a link created by 'copy public link' of a non public Dropbox file goes to the DropBox website
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i94pdbuvhwqsp6f/Traps.png?dl=0
Even if you change the end to ?dl=1 or remove the ?dl=... completely it does the same!
BUT if you change the front end a little to:
Bob JordanB
On my Mac, I assume on other systems as well, there is a difference between dl=0 and dl=1. The difference is that dl=0 shows the web site and dl=1 downloads the file.
When used on a forum link dl=0 for an image fails but if you use dl=1 you get the image displayed. So when used for forums dl=1 works just like it did in a public folder.
The one issue is that share is not available inside the public folder so you can't get a like in the new format, only when outside of the public folder. This is where DB screwed up. They should have been suing the new format from the time they created the share format.
