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!
Of course, another poor decision made by Dropbox executives with an astonishingly poor lack of communication and absolutely no consultation with those paying for the service who are directly impacted by it.
I can't think of a single impressive thing Dropbox has done over the past few years. Let's list some
- Getting rid of HTML rendering in public links
- Nagging paying personal users to upgrade to business
- Refusing to implement highly popular ideas with virtually no Dropbox staff engaging with the community. Rather, we only see these unpaid "super users" insistant on playing devil's advocate and justifying objectively terrible decisions.
- Getting rid of Mailbox
- Hiring highly unpopular executives
- Forcefully requesting users sign up to download public files, likely in order to inflate user numbers to hide the exodus of users.
- Killing the public folder
There's probably more on this list.
Dropbox has become a joke. And to think you've got Guido working for you...
I understand that public image hosting is not a terribly profitable business, but the public folder was literally the sole purpose I and also almost everyone else I know who uses Dropbox chose the service. This news means that they will cancel their subscriptions and now have to go and investigate this service's competitors to see if any provide the feature you are now dropping, as well as having to put a great deal of work in to now transfer all of their previous hyperlinks to new addresses.
I would deeply urge the owners of Dropbox to reconsider. This sidelines the product from one of great utility to one only particularly suitable for creating backups of important documents, something I would get almost the same utility from if I just bought a cheap external hard drive and carried it around with me.
