Ending support of public folder

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Chris R. wrote:

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ColinC wrote:

I keep seeing this comment that we were notified years ago of the change. Sorry but I didn't receive any such notification. If I had I would have changed to the new system at the time.  (If it's relevant, I'm a Pro user.)

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I think what Rich means is that the Public folder was stopped for new users years ago, and that therefore we should have had the commonsense to realize that Dropbox were lying when they said it would remain for existing users.

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To my knowledge I've never received any notification about public folders until the one that started all of this. I don't share my public folder however I do share links to files contained in the folder. I've always followed the following instructions.

******************* Instructions for sharing links *******************

The Public Folder lets you easily share single files in your Dropbox.  Any file you put in this folder gets its own Internet link so that you can share it with others -- even non-Dropbox users!  These links work even if your computer’s turned off.  

Step 1:  Drop a file into the Public folder.

Step 2:  Right-click/control-click this file, then choose Dropbox > Copy Public Link. This copies the Internet link to your file so that you can paste it somewhere else.

That's it!  You can now share this file with others: just paste the link into e-mails, instant message conversations, blogs, etc.!

If you'd like more help with sharing files, head here: http://www.dropbox.com/help/16

Happy Dropboxing!

- The Dropbox Team

Note: You can only link to actual files within your Public Folder, not to folders.

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Note the line that reads "Note: You can only link to actual files within your Public Folder, not to folders." so this was after they removed the ability to post links to the entire public folder so basically it worked the same way as the public link in any other folder works. Yet this files was put in my public folder when I first started using it.

Dropbox could have saved everyone a lot of problems had they set any links created inside the public folder back, when they supposedly notified everyone, to have the exact format as any links created in regular folders but with the dl=1 set. But nooooo, they had to let everyone keep create in a format that they knew was going to break. If they couldn't do that they at least could have popped up a warning box whenever you used the command to create an old style link but nooo, they couldn't do that.

I think dropbox has the moral duty to not break any of the old direct links to files. They may not be legally bound to do so but it would be the moral and ethical thing to do. To do anything else proves how unethical they really are.