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by morganvachon
3388 days ago
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> 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. |
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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.