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!
I absolutely agree with the previous commenters. A lot of people used public links to post images to forums, mostly small ones, which do not provide built-in storage for images and attachments.
On our local community forum I've posted hundreds of such images and advised other users to use Dropbox for this purpose as well. This content is still useful and the loss of it will be a major problem for all our users.
I think Dropbox should rethink this decision and at least preserve existing public links as is. Otherwise, on 09/01/2017, many communities on the web will suffer from losing years of users' contributions.
If this is true than there will be a lot of x-es instead of images on forums that I used in past years. I hope those x-es can be translated to "Courtesy of stupid ignorant decision of Dropbox".
- Mark
Super User II
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.- The news from 4 months ago said that HTML pages can no longer be served via the public folder, it said absolutely NOTHING about the public folder going away - I have thought this would mean you'd simply refuse to serve such files or serve it with the application/octet-stream mimetype.
I find this ironic because dropbox at some stage auto-generated an index.html file for each level in the public folder.
IMO this is a very nasty and unwelcome bait and switch.
I also think your "new share page" is complete and utter aids.
I have no need for the forced community/social media aspect of it, and the last time someone linked me to a tiny little webm using it, it played back at 5 SPF (that is seconds per frame) because the page itself for whatever reason added so much overhead. I received the email with this news today for the first time.
- This explains when the function stopped working some time ago they were testing how it would be and it was terrible I will cancel my subscription
Alexis G.1Super User
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.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.
