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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 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?
- 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!
Sounds like it's time to kill off my dropbox subscription
River ha scritto:
The error here is the words "In many cases", actually you must write "In no cases" because your new sharing will never let us post an image without all your bells and whistles around it.
I am extremely disappointed and angry at the decision to remove the Public folder abilities. I have, over the years, set up many dozens and dozens of links to images posted in blogs and other such locations using the Public folder. To find that these are suddenly going to become invalid is incredibly frustrating, particularly since many of them will be impossible to fix. Even those in the locations that I have easy access would take an impossible amout of time to fix. What a stupid idea.
This is an outrageous violation of your service to your loyal customers. You are removing a procedure that has been in place for years as an integral and trusted tool.
I am NOT impressed.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
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.
I'm unsure of what good it will do, but I'm adding my disappointment, bewilderment, and disgust to the many people who are frustrated with this frankly counterintuitive change to dropbox.
Vast majority of comments here seem to be along the lines of "i have posted links to images/videos on forums and now they will break."
So, basically Dropbox does not want to be everybodies CDN anymore.
abela wrote:
Vast majority of comments here seem to be along the lines of "i have posted links to images/videos on forums and now they will break."
So, basically Dropbox does not want to be everybodies CDN anymore.
But that's what I'm paying them for; It is a sharing and collaboration tool. Is it not?
If it was just for file backups, I would be using backblaze at half the cost and unlimited storage.
This functionality was and is the only reason I use Dropbox. If your intent was to push people away, congratulations.
I'm off to go buid my own Seafile server now, thanks, where I control the whole thing. I think I'd have been better off tossing things up on S3 instead, all these years.
+1. Please reconsider, Dropbox. At least give us a way to keep existing public links active without having to recreate and replace them...
Does anyone in the dropbox see all this here?
Friends do not stop sending emails to the support, making it clear that this is horrible!
I am really upset and angry that support of the public folder is being stopped. It was my favorite feature of Dropbox and I have some links on forums that will get broken because of it and I can't even edit them. The public folder feature was what got me to sign up. I may as well switch to Google Drive once this change happens.
Hello Everyone,
I'm an Android app developer and I'm really disappointed to know that Public folder support is ending on March 15, 2017. Till now, I have developed only one android app which downloads files which I uploaded to public folder of Dropbox. I just copied the public links and put in the app to download. And there are over 100 files :(
Now my fear is that after March 15, my app will become unusable. My question is if Dropbox is providing some different method to share DIRECT links? Is there no way existing links may work?
Isn't there any way or should I move to Drive or somewhere else? Thank you everyone.
I'm devastated by this decision because I have many images on my blog that will disappear when they turn off my links. I could deal with future changes, as I'm willing to do something different if necessary. However; disabling my current links is something I can't fix. I'm very upset that the very reason I use Dropbox is being removed and my work is being ruined. I'm desperatly hoping that there be so many outraged customer responses to this decision that they will reconsider their plans kill our links. I strongly believe it will cost them many customers.
