Ending support of public folder

I think its pretty clear that dropbox has NO intention of changing this.

And I think its pretty clear they did it on purpose to cripple peoples ability to host links.

This garbage that you can host files from any location and that is so much better, is just that garbage!

Public folder links worked as follows.

ONE LINK THAT NEVER CHANGED got you to the public folder, from there you just generated a valid web file path and attached it to the end of it. So all you needed to do is place a file into the public folder (or subfolders) and attache theat path to the end of the NEVER CHANGING LINK, no interaction needed with Dropbox, you already had your link, you drop the file in to your folder and generate your link, place/send it where that needs to go and your done, simple as to automate should you need to in any of a million ways.

Any file links work as follows.

NEW LINKS EVERY FILE, drop the file into a folder, use the context menu or web site to generate a link, use that link as required.

Great kiss automation good bye! Everything is down to the user having to do it.

And who did they do this to?

Was it the JUST THE FREE USERS, if they want something for free they live with what they get?

NO NO NO, DO IT TO THE PAYING CUSTOMERS, that way they will get less for the money they pay! 

FYI: this is not a blip on the radar either, they have kicked paying customers in the head over and over, things like

Increasing the wateful path length of the DfB folder accounts, even when we tell them that will hurt us, there reply, Oh change your file system structure! WTF change for the service provider?

Need more room for your photos, buy a DFB account, and then find you cant sync photos to it, there reply, get a free account and uplaod them to that! WTF did you sell me something I couldnt use for?

And now offer a service and then withdraw it saying this crappy other service is "so much better", there reply "we dont care, we dont care, we stick our fingers in our ears" 

Walk people!

I'm moving my > 400Go to GoogleDrive it is VERY slow (few weeks) because there is lot's of files but it's Google ... Then I will stop my Dropbox paid account.

With the end of the public folder it breaks a free opensource marketeplace on a little project I setup and people using it are not happy because part of the service is down ... 

We need to send a mail to the Director of DropBox to review and retain all the shared links from the "Public Folder". It really matters to a lot of their users.

Don't expect even a reply. THis thread has been going on since Dropbox first advised us the Public Folder support was ending. It ended way back for the free users. And now for those who pay.

If you have access to links and can edit them, just copy the new dropbox link to wherever you use it and change the end from dl=0 to dl=1. Then it should work as before. Problem is getting editing access to forums. Most do not allow editing after a certain time. So thousands and thousands of Dropbox links are now dead. It's not going to change. Just drop dropbox and move on.

I personaly think this move has a lot to do with the below article about Dropbox moving from Amazon servers to build their own system.

Not sure but I am just guessing their reasoning .. it's possibke they had no choice but switch offsupport for public folders.

Also when you build your own solution you implement your own way of working from scratch and new APIs.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-drop-aws-and-build-its-own-infrastructure-and-network/

I'm not sugessting that they will get back with Public forlder functionality, but I understand now it could have been hard decision for them.

Having said that.

I have used often Public forlder links for placing photos on public formus, email signatures, website photos too.

And this actually is possible to still achieve.

What isn't possible for me now is to have a direct download link for the deployment of my mobile database apps.

You can still use the download links but not in the automated way.

It always want to take you to the dropbox page first.

I.e. my app would call trigger a mobile download proces via URL link and then download new version from dropbox automatically into a container. It's not possible anmore. At least my all test has failed.

I had to start using my webiste file sharing functionality to do just that.

Dropbox feels now like a degraded feature. I still use it for storing my beloved data but's it's not the same anymore.