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Forum Discussion
skepticalthinker
2 years agoHelpful | Level 6
Shared link asks viewers to request access. Why does this happen?
Greetings. I have a shared file set to be viewable by anyone with the link, and I've sent the link to those I want to view the file (see screenshot). However, when they access the link, Dropbox sta...
- 2 years ago
Hi skepticalthinker ,
Jumping in here as a Product Manager for Dropbox Sharing to help out Hannah. Reading through your thread, this is very strange indeed. You've done everything right and I appreciate your patience in working through what is no doubt a frustrating experience. The best I can suggest here is to contact support for help. They'll be able to go through your specific situation and troubleshoot your specific link. Sharing a View Link with access set to "Anyone" should allow anyone - signed in or not - to access a web based preview of your content, and then from there to take further collaborative action like downloading, asking to join the content, etc.
Jason
JasonSilverDBX
Dropbox Product Manager
2 years agoHi skepticalthinker ,
Jumping in here as a Product Manager for Dropbox Sharing to help out Hannah. Reading through your thread, this is very strange indeed. You've done everything right and I appreciate your patience in working through what is no doubt a frustrating experience. The best I can suggest here is to contact support for help. They'll be able to go through your specific situation and troubleshoot your specific link. Sharing a View Link with access set to "Anyone" should allow anyone - signed in or not - to access a web based preview of your content, and then from there to take further collaborative action like downloading, asking to join the content, etc.
Jason
paulcardon
2 years agoHelpful | Level 5
Hi @JasonSilverDBX ,
Hopping in here to add some extra info we've uncovered as it looks like there was a recent update to how "Can View" links are generated.
When you send someone a "Can View" link, it now has a special "rlkey=" field. There may have been a similar access code in previous links that stayed in the URL as you navigated, but the issue we're running into now is that when you navigate into any of the folder structure of a "Can View" link, the rlkey disappears from the URL in the browser address bar, leaving access tied to the browser session, so if you were to copy the updated URL and open it in a new session or send it to someone else or open pages from your browser history expecting it to work, now you get either a "Sign Up" page or a "Request Access" page. This was NOT an issue with previous "Can View" links before this update.
We send out links to partners and agencies that then want to share specific links to specific folders in our links amongst their teams, but this update breaks that functionality and will cause confusion as we get kickbacks like, "our team is having trouble with that link", "we tried to request access", "it's making us create a Dropbox account and we would prefer not to do that".
We actually had a similar wave of these issues when shares suddenly defaulted to "Can Edit" invite links on our Dropbox a year or so ago, and manually switching to "Can View" for each share was the solution that made sharing viable, but this update brings back most of the issues we had with "Can Edit" links.
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