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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I'm a Dropbox Plus user and I didn't see a single email or in-app message about this.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> Oh, they definitely notified their users.

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.

I do not see any emails from them. Maybe I read them over quickly and deleted them :-(

I'm not an active dropbox user, but I have had an account for quite some time. I just searched and I have no emails from dropbox about this change.

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