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.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2s31p57eod49dva/1371724997329.png?...
and navigating to this
https://dl.dropbox.com/s/2s31p57eod49dva/1371724997329.png?d...
results in a redirect to this
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/2s31p57eod49dva/13717249...
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.