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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 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 hadn't considered the loss of already posted conent, that is indeed an issue"
Are you SERIOUS?????
ALL the embedded documents I have on countless bogs, mails sent to collaborators, as other users have already pointed out will be soon not working?????????
I'm supposed to start changing links one by one?????????
It is the WORST strategical mistake a company like Dropbox could have done.
Thumbs down.
I hope the CEOs will go back.
Ok, make ALL documents in Dropbox shareable, not only in the public folder. That's good and very handy.
But don't dismiss the ALREADY DONE links to your users.
You'll find users migrating, just for anger and frustration, even if they will have to do the same work in another cloud storing space.
Think it twice: you'll lose the simpathy (and the membership) of thousands. Seriously. Don't do that.
KEEP the links working, and ADD the ability to make public all documents regardless of the folder they are in.
It's simple common sense.
Do you need money? Ok, I'll pay for it. But don't throw all my lifework to trash.
It certainly is a staggering decision by Dropbox. I'm astonished, too, that they haven't engaged in a better dialogue with their users. The first-line support keeps saying the same things, but the people who made this decision are nowhere to be seen.
There is a very good business case for doing this differently. This would help existing users, and protect what's left of Dropbox's reputation. The intended change affects files in the Public folder, *and* in any of its sub-folders (hands-up if you didn't know that), but not everything in those folders was intended to be public in the first place. Solution: simply give a button/option to select for each of your intended public fles that would retain the existing URL after the changeover -- the option can be removed after that time.
It's already been noted that retaining a limited number of those old URLs is not technically difficult. It remains a mystery, though, why this change is so important to Dropbox that they're intent on using the "hammer approach" with little consideration of the impact on their users.
TonyProctor wrote:
It remains a mystery, though, why this change is so important to Dropbox that they're intent on using the "hammer approach" with little consideration of the impact on their users.
It's important because some manager (PR, or financial) said so. You know those managers who invent sometimes some idiotic things to justify their own existence/job.- Well given the amount of vehement feeling here amongst DB's 'clients', they would do well to listen.
Posting here is all very well, but is anyone telling THEM?
How would one do that? Get through to the relevant decision maker I mean.
Is there any chance of a change in direction, or has this ship sailed? We still have 2 months....I tried asking some genuine questions here, some weeks back, but the level of anger and number of posts meant that they went unanswered. I still have a call open with Dropbox, but I'm experimenting with actually making changes. Not only has this meant copying my folder from underneath Public -- where you cannot create new links (Dropbox haven't answered that question for me) -- to a normal location, it means laboriously going through each file to create and copy the new link, then each link has to be modified if you expect your browser to treat it as it did before, and then you have to find all your pages/blog-posts that reference the old link and change them.
Wow! I don't have that many files but it's taking ages!
Incidentally, I went through an almost identical change with Google Drive. However, they removed ALL support for hosting files referenced by pages/posts (i.e. I wasn't hosting actual HTML files). Despite what their marketing said, there was no longer any practical way to make such stuff work. I suppose we should be grateful that at least Dropbox have retaining a way of doing this.
