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Dropbox Kills Public Folders, Users Rebel (ndtv.com)
New submitter rkagerer writes: Dropbox unleashed a tidal wave of user backlash yesterday when it announced plans to eradicate its Public folder feature in 2017. Criticism from users whose links will break surfaced on Reddit, HackerNews and its own forums. Overnight, customers up-voted a feature request to reverse the decision, skyrocketing it to a "Top 10" position on the company's tracker. joemck explains: "There are countless users who have been using the public folder to post images and files in blogs and forums. These aren't just worthless jokes and memes that nobody will miss if you flip the switch and break all of them. These are often valuable resources that users have created and entrusted to you to retain and keep online." One user even created a comic strip for the occasion, with another concerned the URL he registered with the Coast Guard containing potentially lifesaving information will go dark. Although the feature was deprecated in 2012, it remained in place for existing users. The company provides an alternative sharing method, but some users claim it's not as convenient and doesn't provide direct links. According to the announcement, free accounts have until March 15 to update their links, while the lights will go out for paid accounts on September 1. UPDATE 12/17/16: Slashdot reader rkagerer notes, "Dropbox quietly killed the feature request after this story hit the front page, but the original content can still be found interleaved in the forum discussion."
While I personally do no hold a Dropbox account, this decision pisses me off to no end just as much as it does their own users. When looking for rare content required for administering and managing legacy hardware and software, users have been hosting them on public Dropbox accounts. This includes PDF manuals, firmware updates (required for security!) and other useful shit that vendors either no longer provide, or have entirely gone out of business and have no way to get the content from. Yes, the people who host this content on Dropbox right now could move it, but there are thousands and thousands of forum links that will literally break over night and would need the authors to go back and edit said links to point to the new storage locations.
How dare they give only 4 years of deprecation warning, only 3 months specific warning to non-paying users, and only 9 months specific warning to paying users!?! Apparently the Coast Guard has no other place to store documents! People will drown!
Concur. Inexpensive virtual server hosting companies abound. For $10 a month, I have a Linux virtual server with a guaranteed dedicated CPU core and with SSD space far in excess of a free Dropbox account. It hosts my own domain names, Wordpress site, multi-domain email (with webmail) - in short, anything I need, I have on my own server. I can post anything I want and it will stay on my server as long as I want it to. My download links do not disappear. Software like Syncthing takes care of the synchronization features that Dropbox would give. My server. My data!
I am like you, I have been puzzled from the beginning in the allure of trusting data to outside sources. If it's free, then you are the product. If they are storing your data for free, then your data is the product.
A big benefit for those who aren't as technically inclined is a cloud services Linux distro. Domain, email/webmail, file sync, bookmark sharing in a box.
After this story hit the front page, Dropbox quietly killed off some of the links it points to (go figure).
The original feature request along with all its comments up until it was squashed has been faithfully recreated.
Here's the coast guard comment, and a snapshot of the Top 10 list as it appeared Friday afternoon.