This feels like a step backwards. DB has struggled to figure out something beyond being a really great cloud-share drive thing, and sorta kinda messed around with using your DB to host media like photos (which would then make users desire to upgrade their space) and automagically supply some interface sugar around a pile of photos.
But they could have kept going in that direction and competed with all of the photosharing sites, soundcloud, heck even youtube if they had wanted. Say I like to vlog, what would be easier? After filming raw footage, edit it, make my final cut, upload to youtube and wait for transcoding and availability? Or just put my final cut into a "droptube" folder and it automagically appears at www.droptube.com (not a real thing, but could be in some alternate dimension)
Or what if I want to host a simple site? Fiddle with a hosting provider, screw around trying to figure out the 37 different metrics I'll be charged for, or just put some html, css and js file into a dropbox "webhost" folder?
I dunno, I think they're closing off lots of opportunity and have had trouble executing on this kind of cloud application for the masses, or they're really not going after it.
I'm guessing they can't go that route because youtube (google), and twitch (amazon) are the only 600lbs gorillas that can do /something/ to stave off the insane 100lbs gorilla that goes for the jugular (MPAA/RIAA and the like).
Photo-gallery, as you've noted opens them to competing with other such providers... who all seem to eventually race towards throwing ads on everything to try and make some profit.
Freely accessible areas also equate to more consumers (not users), and I don't know if DB's business model charges any kind of fee for access to that data.
This mostly sounds like DB is out of areas they want to / feel they can succeed in tapping for new customers and thus they attempt to cut back on costs with the hope of inertia retaining the existing users.
> This mostly sounds like DB is out of areas they want to / feel they can succeed in tapping for new customers and thus they attempt to cut back on costs with the hope of inertia retaining the existing users.
I'm okay with how Dropbox as-is as a Pro user, and have no problem giving them $100/year in perpetuity.
A product must not constantly evolve/improve for it to succeed (I'm looking at you Github with your damn dark bar at the top nav now!). "Good enough" can carry the day. Sync always works. My files are always there. That's what I'm paying for.
I was pretty happy with paying for Dropbox as-was. Turns out they've now broken a bunch of image links in forum posts and websites I've shared using Dropbox since I joined in 2010 (and became a paying customer later). I will not be renewing my subscription - largely because of this change.
Part of my attention since they announced this change late last year has been taken up asking myself "which of those shared photos do I care enough about to go back to the relevant forum/website and update the link - if that's even possible?" And the realisation slowly grew - I probably don't _really_ care enough about broken links to images - especially on sites I not longer actively use - which raises the obvious question, why am I paying Dropbox at all then?
Sure - their product might need to "evolve" but if I'm paying for a pterodactyl and they've pivoted to small warm blooded mammals, they may well out compete all their dinosaur competitors, but I'm one of the customers who'll say "Sorry, I didn't ask for a mammal, where's my pterodactyl that I've been paying you for?"
> A product must not constantly evolve/improve for it to succeed
Unfortunately, it goes against the startup ethos. That's why I avoid using startup products whenever I can. With regular companies, the problem is less pronounced, though it exists nonetheless.
It's sad people have to keep fucking up things they first made work, only because they're looking for more profit.
Right, but their problem is - at SOME point, google or Microsoft will figure it out. MS in particular will destroy them if they do get their syncing and sharing down. I'm in your same boat but I also have free onedrive through work. The second they get their sharing figured out (and quite frankly they may have already but I haven't put it through the ringer again) - dropbox is in trouble.
OneDrive isn't quite as good as Dropbox, but it's good enough for my use cases - and it costs as much for a five-user family license that includes Office as it does for one Dropbox account.
I ran both in parallel for nearly a year. I've cancelled Dropbox.
My guess is that the reason they are closing this is the cost of bandwidth. Dropbox allowed to host publicly all types of large files and exchange such files by a link that did not require any interaction with DropBox to download. It seems really hard to monetize such usage.
I believe they already do some kind of bandwidth monitoring, so I could also see them just passing that along to subscribers who use too much. I would have also hoped their bandwidth costs would have improved when they moved to their own cloud instead of S3.
I wonder what features Dropbox can offer that won't inevitably be surpassed by Google Drive, iCloud Drive, and OneDrive.
To me, their main strength seems to be that they have the best cross-platform UI/UX right now, but even that may not be the case for long.
Maybe they could evolve/branch into a general-purpose file hosting service, where people can use it to publicly share images (like imgur) and music (like Soundcloud) with the appropriate UI for each case (or spinoff site, e.g. Imagebox and Musicbox) except people would just need one account to comment/vote on everything. Who knows, maybe they can even become an alternative to YouTube..
Let independent developers publish their games and apps from there, bypassing Steam and the other app stores, optionally charging a fee per user, with Dropbox taking a cut.
Maybe even offer a chatroom/messaging system, to compete with Slack/Skype etc.
The core benefit of Dropbox is being "a folder that syncs". They've pretty much nailed it at the very start, and all the recent changes seem to be only step backwards. Lack of ability to link directly to files (instead of their heavy and useless web UI with "download" button) is something that makes their product worse, from user's POV.
Smart sync was a giant leap forward. This one actually makes the sync usable on business accounts as well (fairly small laptop SSD and 15 people storing stuff was a difficult combination).
which can be hotlinked. What this means in a specific sense, I haven't yet learned. I'm particularly interested to know the behavior of any of these links if the file is moved/renamed. I have not tested it, but my intuition is the dropbox.com link would survive a move and the dropboxusercontent.com link would not.
I know it's intentional. I'm just saying it results in something that is definitely not direct and noticeably less useful. That it can be made to trigger a download is not particularly useful.
I agree that it's not direct and less useful. The commenter I originally responded to, however, appeared to be concerned with the ability to link to files in a way that doesn't bring up the Dropbox UI, which the query parameter does at least accomplish to some degree.
I'm amazed that there wasn't an outcry the other month when they - just one day, with zero notice - renamed my shared folder and made it a Team folder.
Big deal? Well, they actually changed the name of the folder. And now I can't modify it. So yeah, big deal. I have Logic Pro templates that look there. They all broke. It wasn't too bad for me, but imagine if you had scripts or tools or whatever pointing to a file on your FS that happened to be in one of the affected folders. You woke up one morning and they were all broken.
You can't just rename people's files. That's not part of the social contract I have with you, Dropbox.
I use http://johnnydecimal.com (disclosure: mine!) to organise my files. Symlinking is possible, but dirty. Messes other things up. I can't remove the folder that Dropbox put there.
It's just not right. It's my file system. Get your hands off it.
I relied on this "light" publishing for a few things and I'm quite pissed off. I did not notice any notification on this.
To me, this should be done very very visibly and with tons of warnings. I used it to communicate screenshots with details, etc. Now all links are broken and I'm SOL with no viable solution to changing those links from documents, bugs, etc., etc.
Oh, they definitely notified their users. There were emails and warnings in the UI, it was very visible. Really, you can't blame Dropbox there.
However, one can still blame Dropbox for the change itself. I used this on several occasions, including hosting archives for academic publications. No way in hell I can change those links. Maybe that wasn't a wise choice, but at that time it looked like a good way: The link did not give a clue about my identity, making peer review easier, and DB being a well-funded and known internet company those links were surely meant to work forever, cool URLs don't change is something they had to know. Boy was I wrong.
There was an email in mid December 2016, another one at the beginning of March 2017, and if I remember correctly, one even before that. I'm not even a Pro user.
Confirming, I got mail on Dec 16 and Mar 03 notifying me of this. (Pro User, they renewed my account automatically on Dec 01, which annoyed me somewhat... "Here' we're taken your payment, but failed to mention to you we were announcing in two weeks the removal of the most useful bit to you from the service you're paying for! Have a nice day!"
> Maybe that wasn't a wise choice, but at that time it looked like a good way: The link did not give a clue about my identity, making peer review easier, and DB being a well-funded and known internet company those links were surely meant to work forever, cool URLs don't change is something they had to know. Boy was I wrong.
I also fell into the trap (back when I had an active Dropbox account) of using the Public folder and sharing links from there. At some point along the way, Dropbox started allowing one to share single files from any private folder without exposing the rest of the folder to the audience, and I started using that method instead. Still, even if I had stayed with Dropbox I probably would have some orphaned /Public links out there somewhere, thanks to this change.
I think we both could have avoided that trap by setting up a small storage VPS with a provider like Digital Ocean or Vultr and installing a document management system. It would still be fairly anonymous; a truly determined detective could find the owner but it would likely require a subpoena, which Dropbox would have been vulnerable to as well.
> I think we both could have avoided that trap by setting up a small storage VPS with a provider like Digital Ocean or Vultr and installing a document management system.
That can break though. And admittedly, I didn't want to have costs for this, especially not re-occuring, being a student at the time. I could have asked my university/IT to take care of this, but that would have meant bureaucracy and a long waiting time, time I did not have.
I wasn't even an active DB user at that time anymore, having moved away when Condoleezza Rice joined. But the way they are handling this I only get more convinced that was the right choice. It is one thing removing functionality, it is another breaking links. At least they should have a way to manually share files, and let them have the exact same link they had before. But I guess that is only of interest for people with an interest in technology, a demographic DB is not interested in anymore.
Even worse: the new "shared links" do not work for hotlinking photos, which is the only use I had for them. I understand Dropbox may not like this kind of traffic, but it still sucks they removed the functionality.
Anecdotally speaking, also didn't get any notifications about this.
I have an email about the new ToS 12/28, and a research survey request on 12/11, plus the regular login emails I receive, but absolutely nothing about this over the last few months.
I also just checked, and my public folder has been downgraded to a regular one, so I am part of the post-2012 signups.
I am a Dropbox Plus user. I never received any emails. I just checked and the email address that dropbox has is correct. This change breaks the links to PDFs of some papers and posters that I presented at scientific meetings a few years ago. I didn't expect the links to last forever, but it's still a shame.
They probably should have had some warning on the app itself when putting or sharing files from that folder.
It's a free service, so my bad for using it without a good backup, but I had used programs for a long long time that produce screenshots with one keystroke and copy the URL to the clipboard, saving time.
I figured this was relatively low overhead for them and a popular feature, so they would keep it. Lesson learned ..
I got (and noticed the email), but putting notification in the app or website would have most likely gone completely unnoticed for me. The nice thing about Dropbox (for me) is that it vanishes completely to me. It's just another folder on my Macs that "magically" has the same stuff everywhere, and in my phone/tablets I pretty much exclusively use it's other-app-integration. I can't remember the last time I opened the Dropbox app or visited the site.
I got a notification about ToS change on Dec 21st, but it doesn't mention any features going away, mostly changes to which profile information will be displayed in various situations.
Looking over the past 6 months, I don't have anything else but "Hey, you added a new device to Dropbox!"
Nope - only the business plan - my Pro Plan (which they rebilled two weeks before announcing this change) has also just broken all its public folder links...)
Dropbox has been becoming increasingly user-hostile for a great while now, and it all centers around the deprecation of the Public folder.
I think this change primarily serves to funnel downstream content viewers to the shared file "landing page". That landing page is filled with valuable screen real-estate that Dropbox can use to promote itself.
That page is a usability nightmare, too. Photos can't be zoomed to full size on certain screen configurations, videos are served transcoded, and many other file types that the browser can render natively are flagged as "undisplayable". File content will often become unavailable or hidden behind a full-splash "create a Dropbox account!" affordance that pays no heed to whether you're logged in, a customer, or just a casual observer.
This drives me bananas every time someone links me through DropBox. I actively dislike people sharing stuff to me with DropBox.
Would make sense to make for a free product but if people are paying and this is still broken, seems a bit stupid.
Actually... now that I think about it; what annoys me most is the fact that it pops up a login box. If it was just on the side not covering the content I probably wouldn't dislike it so much.
I use GitHub. I'm a developer, so maybe this is hard... They let you use their website to create a repo, add a file, and then in the settings specify that master is the source branch for GhPages so that it's available via the browser to the world at yourname.github.io/yourproject. You can even add a custom ___domain if you want.
Check the box to Initialize this repository with a README
Click the Create repository button
Click the Create new file button
Name the file index.html
Enter <p>Hello World</p> in the body of the file
Click the Commit new file button
Click the Settings gear icon
Scroll down to GitHub Pages
Select master branch under Source
Click the Save button
There's now a link to username.github.io/hello under the GitHub Pages heading. You can now edit the index.html file or add css and js resources in the same way you just added the index file. Uploading files, such as images, is also supported. All without using Git.
is github pages limited to jekyll? Or can you host any kind of html page? I thought about it as well but it adds a lot of complexity. Git is not easy to learn.
Oh wait, you're saying that you can do everything without using Git? That sounds good then.
You can host any kind of HTML. Jekyll is just there so you can check in Markdown and config and GitHub will generate the HTML for you whenever you commit. But it doesn't have to work that way. Plenty of static site generators also support GitHub Pages as a hosting method.
The Archive's philosophy is that they welcome any and all content. If you want your content to be on the internet, available for everyone to see and for the future to find, then by all means use the archive. Far more apt than a dropbox folder imho.
S3 buckets with the website feature enabled, but you have to pay for usage and I don't know of a way to emulate Dropbox's local filesystem integration with S3... at least not one that's accessible for nontechnical users.
That's kinda the problem - why _should_ this be free?
If it matters at all to you, you can host a huge amount for static website content for single digit dollars per year on S3.
If it's not worth that much to you, who in their right mind will build a service based on providing that to you at your price point? And if they _have_ a service where the marginal cost of you not-caring-enough-to-pay makes little difference, you should - as this Dropbox change demonstrates - fully expect that "feature" to go away when the costs or support (or legal problems) get noticed.
It's not that it should be free. It's just that it used to be.
Unfortunately, I don't think that "if it matters so much to you, you can pay $X" is a useful position. More helpful would be "beware free services that cause vendor lock-in and may stop being free at any time".
Do you use a free Gmail account? If so, how important is it for you?
and not only did it used to be free,
but when they took it away,
they refused to give people an option to pay for it.
they really botched an opportunity to get people to upgrade.
further, they hurt their integrity in the process,
and their integrity is one of their most important assets.
so, overall, it was a tremendously bad mistake.
it's also puzzling they never gave any credible explanation for it. in the meantime, there are at least two alternatives, namely htmldrop.com and updog.co; both are new, and thus who knows how long they will last, but if you need something now, you have options.
So just like Google Wave/Buzz/Knol/Answers/every-other-20%-time-project-that-wasn't-email-maps-or-ads?
I'm with you on the outrage, just perhaps a bit more pragmatic about the inevitability. (And I'm a paying customer too. Or at least will be until my current billing cycle ends...)
i'm not outraged. i'm not even affected by it, except in the most tangential way. i would describe myself as "perplexed". by the change itself (although maybe it's to protect themselves against black-hat hackers, for some reason they've opted not to explain), but even more so by the oafish way they enacted it. (although, as some consolation, they did give plenty of warning to [most] users.)
Because I'm trying to teach someone how to make a simple webpage and publish it on the internet. If in this workflow you have to get your credit card out you're doing it wrong.
Just guessing, but might they have had something in their EULA / TOS up until October 4:th 2012 that somehow forces them to keep the Public folder available? Maybe some language about how features are removed /deprecated, or about how changes in the EULA / TOS are allowed to be done, that makes it infeasible to do without breaking the contract?
Maybe just coincidental, but while I was searching thru Dropbox mail looking for details for another reply here, I noticed this message from Aug 26th 2016:
"We’re reaching out to let you know that if you haven’t updated your Dropbox password since mid-2012, you’ll be prompted to update it the next time you sign in. This is purely a preventative measure, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience."
2012 was apparently when Dropbox had 68 million email addresses and hashed passwords compromised. It just took 4 years for anyone to find out about it.
Cynical-me wonders if this is because whoever got this passwords also got the backend source, and they've discovered security problems that're easier to fix by killing features than but actually fixing the code the attackers have?
October 4, 2012 was the cutoff where they stopped generating Public folders for new Dropbox accounts-- at the time, existing accounts could still use the Public folders that had already been created.
I'm guessing they mention those accounts in the announcement to make it clear that the changes don't apply to those accounts, since pre-10/4/12 accounts never had a Public folder at all.
I don't understand why October 4, 2012 is even mentioned here. That's when they disabled public folders for new users, but now they are getting rid of all of them. Dropbox is getting rid of public folders entirely.
The second most useful feature of Dropbox (beyond being "a folder that syncs"), gone. I'm very sad about this, even though I knew it was coming. This is literally the case of "we can't have nice things because $reasons".
The Public folder is what dragged me in fully and made me stay with Dropbox. I am their paying customer now, and this very moment, I'm considering whether I'm pissed off about the thing enough to move those few gigs of data I have with Dropbox to some self-hosted solution.
Yeah - I've got an AWS account which in months where I don't use anything except my S3 storage costs me around 90c/month - and I have a licence for Transmit which gives me almost identical folder-sync like behaviour from Mac OS. There's some useful-to-me stuff the iOS Dropbox app does, but for 90-100/year I suspect I can solve or ignore that problem...
Well, $600mil in VC cash, it's not like nobody saw this coming... I can almost see in my head the guy from JPMorgan saying "So geeks, time to stop screwing around - how're you going to increase the pressure to monetise all those users and get me my 100x return on that half a billion dollars? Quickly!"
How would this help? They still allow sharing links even for free accounts. It's just that it's not direct linking and instead you're forced to go to a Dropbox page.
No, it probably has to do with making downloaders go to Dropbox and tempt them to subscribe.
I really have the feeling that DropBox will die. They don't do anything Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Apple iCloud doesn't do, and these companies all have much more money / talent / infrastructure / synergy with other products.
For some reason I still only instinctively trust Dropbox to reliably sync my files. I'm always worried I'm going to lose something if I put it into my Google Drive or iCloud folder, though I'm sure by this point it is probably just as good/reliable.
My concerns have less to do with individual files being manually added to a Google Drive or iCloud folder and more to do with how well it handles starting entire new project folders w/ hundreds (or thousands) of files that are constantly being updated.
> For some reason I still only instinctively trust Dropbox to reliably sync my files.
Used to be that way for me too until all the nasty tricks they employed in the OS X app installation process to elevate their privileges came to light. Though the syncing still works as reliably I no longer trust them with the content or to behave responsibly.
I haven't had any issue syncing with OneDrive or Google Drive for larger projects. I don't doubt you might've run into that issue in the past but I'd recommend giving it a go if that's what's holding you back. If anything knowing that you can reliably switch storage providers in the future should you need to is a good card to hold.
In the case of Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, I don't have enough trust they'll keep their offering around to ever start using and relying on it.
Google and to a slightly lesser degree Microsoft have horrible histories of simply turning off successful services. Or "improving" them by replacing with something objectively worse.
Tell me more about how great these kind of companies are, where they can terminate aspects (or all) of a service you have come to rely on. These kind of shenanigans are exactly why I don't trust Google with anything other than core services, and why I do my best to not rely on anything "cloud" (as in, consumer-facing stuff)Too much control in the hands of those who are not accountable to anyone, especially not to me.
I have been told many times (here, as well as elsewhere) how I don't "understand" cloud and related drivel. I understand cloud very well. That's why I don't depend on it.
> Effective September 1, 2017, Dropbox Pro, Plus, and Business users will no longer be able to render HTML content, and the Public folder and its sharing functionality will be disabled.
It's not incorrect if it is only true for a (in this case, large) subset of people.
The now changed title completely misses the point of this submission, and is not more correct or less editorialized than the original one. I would prefer if it were restored, the "today" could get removed to cover that it will happen later for Pro Accounts. If memory serves me right it would be something like "Dropbox disables Public folder". That is what happens.
I agree. I would recommend "(2012, 2017)" to succinctly clarify that this is somehow relevant to right now and that further investigation is needed.
Note: I have flagged the parent comment so that it shows up for the moderators (and also upvoted it to counteract the impact of flagging). So, nobody else needs to flag it - if too many people do so it might go [dead].
I'm talking about the article title as shown here. If it said "Dropbox accounts created after Oct. 2012 won't have a public folder (2012; 2017)" or perhaps "... (2017)" then readers would be able to go "okay, what's this, it has this year in it, what gives" and click it. You're only able to know about Sep 1st once you actually open the article, which in its current form seems to talk about an event from 5 years ago.
Unless I'm mistaken, this won't affect services such as Site44.com [0], which lets you create up to 10 Web sites by syncing with specified Dropbox folders for $4.95 per month. I use the service for a side project and to publish a site for my students with the materials for the law-school course I teach; it works quite well. (EDIT: And that's my only connection with the company.)
Seeing the /help/16, I'm guessing this is one of the oldest help page of Dropbox. /help/1 and /help/2 don't exist, so the still published oldest one must be https://www.dropbox.com/help/3 "System requirements to run Dropbox", makes sense
You're probably right. This page has existed since at least 2009, in various forms[0]. For many years, it helpfully instructed users how to share the files in their public folder, one of their most useful features from day 1.
I used to use UpShot, a OS X plugin that saved by screenshots to my Public Dropbox folder and copied the public link to the clipboard. It was super useful for referencing images in code reviews, wikis etc.
It's not a direct link to file, but a link to their UI which only then offers a "download" option. Besides being incredibly annoying (over a megabyte of useless JS and tracking crap), it kills off many functionalities that were enabled by public links being direct-to-file URLs.
That's not answer to the parent's question. Tor has very little to do with the ability to host your website by just plopping HTML into the Shared folder you used to have on Dropbox.
AFAIK creating new accounts didn't give you a folder "Public" anymore since a long time ago, but they still existed with preserved functionality for old users.
But they could have kept going in that direction and competed with all of the photosharing sites, soundcloud, heck even youtube if they had wanted. Say I like to vlog, what would be easier? After filming raw footage, edit it, make my final cut, upload to youtube and wait for transcoding and availability? Or just put my final cut into a "droptube" folder and it automagically appears at www.droptube.com (not a real thing, but could be in some alternate dimension)
Or what if I want to host a simple site? Fiddle with a hosting provider, screw around trying to figure out the 37 different metrics I'll be charged for, or just put some html, css and js file into a dropbox "webhost" folder?
I dunno, I think they're closing off lots of opportunity and have had trouble executing on this kind of cloud application for the masses, or they're really not going after it.