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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."
Cannot control tubes!
You're gonna sue Dropbox for being bi?
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.
The cloud is someone else's hard drive attached to someone else's server in someone else's data center at the end of an Internet pipe controlled by someone else. If that works for you - and it might! - great. But do be aware of what you are doing.
sPh
Fine for "free" users. You get what you pay for, and can't expect any more. But for paid users, this is evil. At the very least, they should maintain all existing links, while forcing new content to change to the new schema.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I pay for a Dropbox account...
I pay for my domain name, host all data on my server and back the server content encrypted to my home machine and to a friend of mine home machine. I never had any problems. I have always been puzzled by people trusting free services to host their important and even sometimes sensitive data.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
A lot of these folks think that the bandwidth being used by serving up images from free Dropbox accounts to web pages is, well, free. They are sort of idiots to think that Dropbox would continue to let them freeload like this as Dropbox faces increasing price pressure from providers like Amazon, OneDrive, Box, and others (none of which have quite the feature set of DropBox, but all of which have the basic storage often at a better price).
Online companies are using the same BS strategy from the first internet boom and this one will end just as badly. Promise users the world for free (to build scale rapidly), become the dominant player in your niche, and then come up with a business plan that entails taking back the expensive but high-utility services that customers came to you in the first place for. The process is entirely backwards because it eliminates the price-discovery feedback loop that businesses need in order to establish whether their business model/pricing is even workable.
.... for DropBox to change public document access to a redirect, provided by the owner of the dropbox folder? The person will have to find a new host and provide the url to DropBox so that it can redirect, obviously, and then DB's public document system basically turns into url redirection mechanism so that the existing links don't break if the person who had uploaded the doc finds a new host for the content.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Using S3 as an image hosting service. S3 is also a nice cheap way to do static websites without messing with a shady hosting company. Not the easiest way in the world, but still easy enough for anyone who can code.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
Do you acknowledge the oxymoron?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I pay for my domain name, host all data on my server and back the server content encrypted to my home machine and to a friend of mine home machine.
Unlike the child posters, I'll refrain from being an AC. If your process could be made derp-proof, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, few non-geeks have the acumen to implement such a backup plan. The Cloud(tm) remains the only practical solution for most.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I don't understand why people are so outraged. This is the very nature of cloud services -- you store your information on someone else's servers, depending on their whims to keep that information accessible. There are no guarantees that the information you put on someone's servers today will still be there tomorrow.
What I find the most stunning is that some people are putting, "...valuable resources that users have created and entrusted to you to retain and keep online" on someone else's servers, and expecting that it will still be there when they need it.
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.
Unlike the child posters, I'll refrain from being an AC. If your process could be made derp-proof, I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, few non-geeks have the acumen to implement such a backup plan. The Cloud(tm) remains the only practical solution for most.
Exactly. I totally agree with grandparent -- I've got my own domainname + server for almost 15 years. However the ease of Dropbox sharing is amazing.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Hmm, I thought the primary meaning is still a bunch of water floating in the sky, with a marketing gimmick for someone else's unreliable computer being far on the list.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
If a five year grace period isn't enough for them, then they are bottom feeders. despite their overpriced suits and shiny uniforms.
What grace period? The first I've heard of them dropping the service is this post on facebook. They certainly haven't made it obvious that the feature is depreciated happily letting users create new public links and shares.
Live by the cloud, die by the cloud...
You want your data? Then you're responsible for it. Right now, in the end, network presence costs somebody money. If you're not paying in some way, you can expect your data to go away at some point when they get tired of paying for you. Even if you are paying, eventually, they'll try and gain more profit by trimming service, and again you lose. Corporations always have to increase profit. The shareholders demand it. And you, you're the source of it. Anything you cost them, they will look to reduce if they possibly can.
Plus, you can't trust them. These services variously demand your name, your email, your mobile phone number, your mother's maiden name, your social security number... and then, bam, breach...
Most people on slashdot have no excuse. Set up an isolated server on its own wan-facing network, secure it, anything you want public facing, back it up off-LAN and then sneaker-net it to the server in a USB stick or whatever. Anything you don't want public facing... don't put it on the server. Put all those massively insecure home automation devices on the same network; then they can go crazy compromising security in an environment where they can't get at your non-public data. Watch the network traffic form the server, and if any of them start playing the "I am a botnet zombie", set them on fire and write off the manufacturer as a source of devices. The only way we'll ever get these companies to make good devices is if we make them pay for selling insecure crap. Plus, maybe then they'll hire real programmers again instead of these glorified script kiddies and cookie-cutter green-carders who don't know what a memory overrun even is.
Control your own destiny instead of handing it over to corporate entities. Otherwise... it's very likely going to bite you eventually.
Live by the cloud, die by the cloud...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually the title should read...
Dropbox killing deep linking resources
This after reading hundreds of comments and concerns on the various forum topics about how most people were mad about having to update their websites and the "thousands" of links that point to these resources.