Ending support of public folder

RIVER..

We understand our sharing options and the changes to the link formatting. That is not the issue. 

The issue is you want us to go back and update millions of links.

DropBox is acting like we bookmark every post we ever made, or even have access to anymore. Then we can "JUST" go fix the posts with new links.. THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. 

THIS CAN NOT HAPPEN EVEN IF WE WANTED TOO,

IN MANY CASES WE NO LONGER HAVE ACCESS TO THE OLD POSTS TO EVEN EDIT THE LINKS.

Then even if we do have access to the post to edit it, we simply do not have time to hunt down 5 years worth of posts to fix them all. 

So, from car forums, home schooling forums, knitting forums, rescue squad forums, you name it, valuable data will be essentially destroyed. Understand from hobbies to work related issues, these forums cover the gambit of social media. All of them will now lose years of valuable information and "value" themselves, they will all look at Dropbox as the one that has destroyed their information and will leave for other services. This ends up with fewer end users for you and all of them speaking bad about your business, that is not a way to increase your value. It IS a way to lose value and respect across the internet.

Some of us have contributed to thousands of posts scattered across these multiple forums using dropbox to host the images and information in them. One other thing to consider is many forum contributors in many of these same forums over the last 5 years have passed. They are the only ones that know these links exist and are the only ones that had some of the information they shared. You will be eliminating their contributions as well. 

This move is very similar to moves at MySpace.com, MP3.com, Geocities, Homestead, etc.. that ruined the value of a known service. They all lost their userbase and their value virtually overnight thanks to self-inflicted damage. All are now much smaller and worth much less, or got bought by competition for pennies on the dollar and shut down.

Yes change the system., make it more secure. Make people use the new more secure generated links. BUT DO NOT KILL ALL THE OLD ONES.. Thats what we are asking you too do. We don't need to know how to learn to create new links, we get how to do that. We DONT want to have to create NEW links for MILLIONS of OLD ones. 

Most of us can adjust to not having dropbox host the files like they used too and adjust to having to use new code for embedded files.

What we CAN NOT DO is fix all the OLD links to the OLD files that are scattered all over the internet.