I was user 315, back when it was possible to determine your user number via the public url feature.

Is there anything this simple now? What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).

In the limit case you should be able to use it as a webhosting service for static files, since visiting an html page in a browser serves that file and relative links are preserved.

I guess it's a losing value proposition, but it sure would be nice.

It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.

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al_borland 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's unfortunate the original demo video was lost to time. I remember how astounding it was.

Is this the video you're thinking of?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...

	▲	sillysaurusx 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. Holy crap, you actually found the original. There was a recording of a presentation Drew gave later on about Dropbox, but it wasn't as good. This is definitely the original. Thanks for the memories!

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layer8 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What I miss is being able to right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item (with nothing else; no image overlays, no ads, nothing).

That still works for me, when replacing dl=0 with dl=1 at the end of the URL (dl = download).

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sillysaurusx 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately that downloads the file directly, rather than displaying it in browser, so it's not a very nice way of linking screenshots to someone. The other use case is an html file that contains references to images within the same folder, like <img src="foo.png">. You'd want it to display in the browser, not download the html page as a file.

	▲	layer8 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, I see. But that usage is exactly why they don’t permit it anymore, it’s been abused too much. People were hosting whole sites on Dropbox, that’s not what it’s for.

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tyler71 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

pcloud with the public folder works well. I've uploaded a few html ebooks with relative routing and it has worked fine.

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sillysaurusx 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Where's the public folder? I tried uploading an html file but can't get a direct link to it: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZ6NzI5ZoJ0CG3nPXqBF...

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tyler71 4 hours ago | parent [-]

https://www.pcloud.com/help/general-help-center/what-is-the-...

	▲	sillysaurusx 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks very much!

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jeffbee 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> right click on an item, click "copy public URL", paste it into the browser, and get an exact copy of that item

You have described Google Drive.

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sillysaurusx 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Not quite; it's not a direct link to the item.

Put <img src="foo.jpg"> into an html file, alongside foo.jpg. In the original Dropbox, if you opened a link to the html file, you'd see a webpage that successfully rendered foo.jpg. So you could use it as a static file host.

	▲	georgel 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It was such a nice feature too, but very easily and quickly abused.