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!
lupussonic wrote:
Why in gods name did they think this was a good idea?
Well, I have a theory. Dropbox's failure to innovate has led to disappointing results recently which leaves their equity holders nervous. Unlike a public company, this is all happening in boardrooms and we have no insight into what's going on. But private equity holders are vicious and want results.
When you provide a shared link (non-public), users who try download your content are nagged to sign up to Dropbox. This misleading conduct encourages people to signup, deceptively raising the number of active users. They can't do this with public links.
Also, it gives them less wriggle room to introduce ads on the download page which I have believed would eventually happen for a long time. So if sometime in the future, you get a craftily-worded public relations response litered with weasel words saying, something like "We know you love Dropbox. We want to keep that experience for as long as possible. That's why we're including sponsored content on our download pages" yada yada yada --- come back to this post -- hello 2018 was 2017 as bad a year as 16? Did Le Pen join Trump and Brexit in the world of political claptrap?
Dropbox is smart though. They don't make all these terrible changes at once or a bulk exodus could not be hidden by sneaky conduct such as the aforementioned (practically) forced sign ups. They take it slowly, one at a time.
I have already backed up all my dropbox content on OneDrive and where I can attaching the pictures in replies to old threads. But still most will be lost and Dropbox will find out come March just how much they are screwing up.
