Re: Ending support of public folder

TL; DR: Please listen to your users, and change your mind about killing the Public folder!

Dear Dropbox,

I just received notice that you'll be discontinuing the Public folder feature next year.  Could you please explain why you are doing so?

I've been using this handy feature ever since I first started with Dropbox many years ago.  It's very convienient to simply drop in a file, and grab the URL with a single click.  Using your "Share Links" feature takes more steps and is not as frictionless an experience.

I have over 300 files in my Public folder, and it would be impractical to manage all of them as shared links.  The tooling you provide stinks.  e.g. There are places in your product where it simply throws up a dropdown of all your shared items.  Good luck digging through hundreds of entries for the one you want in a tiny little UI element like this (taken from your Support system):

Searching and filtering are badly needed, along with the ability to maintain hierarchy (or at least some kind of tagging/grouping) when creating / viewing / managing links.  I already get all of this for free by simply using the Public folder and my everyday desktop shell.

One of the key things I use my Public folder for is to house assets for posts I make to forums, bulletin boards, etc., particularly when the system I'm posting to doesn't support images.  I put the images or files I want to share in my Public folder, and post the link (or insert the image via URL) as content in my post.  I used this as a convenient alternative to uploading the files to my FTP server.  My intent was for these shared links to be reasonably permenant (at least so long as I pay my Dropbox bill).

The links are still out in the wild web today, and in some cases I am simply not able to update them.  e.g. Often I would use TinyURL to obfuscate the user id portion of my Dropbox link (at least from casual users / web crawlers), and to provide a more human-friendly URL.  Those links cannot be changed once created. In other cases I no longer have access to the forum system, or if I do, they don't allow editing of old posts.  But the content is still up there for the world to see and click, and on a regular basis is still useful to the community I shared it with.

Now you're telling me that on September 1, the lights go off and all those links will go dead.  Despite the fact that I'm continuing to pay my bill.

One of the things I hate most on the internet is Dead Links.  How often has a web search led you to an old forum post that would nail down the answer to a question you have, if only the images didn't all come up as "Image not found"?

When I share content, I make an effort to only use services from providers I trust who will keep that content where I put it indefinitely (or at least until I'm no longer around to care).  It was a big deal and leap of faith, moving from my FTP server to using your software instead.  I trusted you.  You broke that trust.  And now you're going to make me look like a fool on every single forum where I included content from my Dropbox.

I tried Shared Links out when you first introduced them, and wasn't impressed.  In addition to requiring more cognitive overhead by the end user to utilize them, and the poor tooling described above, I found the user experience for people I was sharing content with to be unacceptable.  Instead of simply clicking the link I sent them to directly download the file, they are taken to a Dropbox webpage where they need to perform more clicks and/or suffer an HTTP Redirect to get at the file.  This breaks certain workflows where my intent is to simply provide a direct link.

At one point you even tried to use my links to drive user adoption, by making it look and feel like the person had to create a Dropbox account before gaining access to my content.  I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it was quite frankly a sleazy thing to do.

I generally share content in my Public folder with individual users or within small communities focused on a particular topic I'm interested in.  I'm careful not to use the feature in a manner that would generate "high-traffic" or break your ToS.  I'm just an everyday, technically-savvy fellow who finds your Public folder extremely convenient.

I'm sure there are others out there using the Public folder in various ways to make their lives better.  In fact, a lot of people feel the same way I do:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Sharing-and-collaboration/Ending-support-of-public-folder/m-p/197906#M11718

I can only imagine the aggravation it will cause folks all over the web when September hits and the lights go out all over corners of the internet.

I urge you to keep the Public folder alive.

If I can't change your mind, then I beg you to at least give us an easy way to migrate all our existing Public folder items into shared links in a manner that retains their current "legacy" URL's.

Note: For anyone reading, this entry was originally in the form of a Feature Request which overnight got upvoted to a Top 10 spot on the company's tracker.  After a mention on Slashdot, Dropbox expunged the request and interleaved the content into this discussion thread instead.