My letter to Dropbox

I've just finished writing and sending this mail to dropbox tech service I thought it deserved a share as it serves as a good warning to all :


Hello,

I am a frequent forum user and use your site professionally and lucratively. I honestly must say these years of devoted fidelity are filled with nothing but regret. It's a common issue that I have on dropbox that my links are banned because (and this is what blows me away) the pictures on the forums I post on capped what is allowed for OUTGOING bandwidth from my cloud (yeah, you heard right OUT, not IN. You know... ...the one I'm completely unrelated to and have no control over...)

Now I've roughly calculated that what blew the cap this time is something around 70 kilobytes... that's as much up bandwidth as people get in some lost corners of Africa on a PRIVATE individual's pirate internet connection. You have SYMMETRICAL connection on SERVERS in the UNITED STATES.

Now I know what you're thinking of answering to me : "but why don't you order dropbox pro, we'll remove this cap".

that is no longer an option.

If you wanted to find the BEST POSSIBLE WAY of MAKING SURE I never ever did that, well congratulations. You've succeeded. You've done a bang-up job and noone could have done it better.

As per my storage quantity, you can tell I've been more than faithful and brought a great number of my (unsuspecting) friends to your service.

This cap that does not exist on any other cloud service and I'm thinking of google in particular which offers triple the amount of free GBs than what I've acquired over these long hard years.

Do the math with me : I've only used half of the space I have. Less than some 10% of these files are still being viewed at rare times the rest is COMPLETELY INACTIVE. Out of this 10% there are some 10% that are very active but NONE of those files exceed 60KB. And THESE FILES ... are using too much of your bandwidth?!?

I'm sorry, but what kind of cloud service do you claim to be?

Here's the deal : I want this cap off for good. For good. I don't want to EVER go through unblocking my account again.

Your vile shamings for something I didn't do is a practice that is among the lowest I have witnessed in business and you, as a company, should take some serious time to think about the ethics of such acts.

If this isn't done by Saturday I'm packing my bags and moving all my content to google drive and making all my friends do so as well, and will forever spread the word.

I don't think the saying "word of mouth is the best ad" came from nowhere and trust me : I will make this saying adorn it's true glory.

...If it comes to that.

But I'm confident you'll restore my privileges (and permanently) in due time because you are a professional company that listens to their customers AND users.

On a plus note your web interface is currently the best and upload times the fastest (which again boggles the mind when it comes to those bans).

Thank you for reading and your time, I wish you a day void of any impediments (as I hear tell these days are the best)!

tatsu

Out traffic simply is how much data goes out from the dropbox servers to the world (the users who download your images from your dropbox account). So ofc they will complain about out bandwidth.

I don't get what I should use dropbox for anyway. Just get your own vserver. So much more options.
My own files are in my private svn on there.

My bet is they won't care about your letter

yeah but they CAN'T make that MY problem or FAULT.

how do I have any influence over that?

plus they have no reason to, it's not at all a problem for them, If you read my whole letter you'll see. they have PLENTY of out bandwidth. bans are just an annoyance (and a sham) they've come up with, like ads (but much much worse) to make people buy pro.

oh I know. I'd love to get prooved otherwise which is why I sent it anyways.

it is entirely your fault for misusing them as a public image hoster. Use imgur for that.

it is NOT a misuse. it's one of their advertised services. and I like their interface.

with the right tools you can basically mark an area of your screen at any time and go "put that on imgur and give me the link into my clipboard".


Now that's an awesome way to share images.

@cola_colin I'll check it out.
it's time I migrate either way.

ok I'm curious, fill me in

I use a tool called hyperdesktop for that, it had a website of its own in the past, but now only fishy downloads remain it seem.
Weird, it's a really helpful freeware. I don't think it even needs an installer, here is my copy of it.
http://nanodesu.info/stuff/hyperdesktop.exe

So, according to the Dropbox Help Centre:

(source)

You said you images are smaller than 200 KiB, so that means that you are maybe hitting the 100,000-downloads-per-day one.

According to questionable websites that proclaim to know the stats for forums.uberent.com[1][2], they get about 200,000 visits per month, so that's about 6,500 per day. Your signature has two images, so that alone means 13,000 per day per post viewed. Any other sites that you use your Dropbox links on? I'll bet you can make the 100,000 per day through statistical fluctuations.

But yeah, Dropbox isn't entirely meant for that. Imgur would work better for you. And from what I can tell, they at least don't have any limits. Or just use the dirty sneaky trick that I used for my sig.
(Though that means it's only visible for logged in people)

By the way, Imgur itself lists a whole bunch of tools as well: https://imgur.com/tools/

well i don't believe what they say and what they do have very much in common unfortunately.

no hotkey? nevermind

no hotkey, I rightclick the tray icon.

That is a veeeeeeeeery questionable calculation indeed. Browsers tend to cache images and not everyone who opens the forums will open an image in some thread.
Hyperdesktop can be configured to upload the images via ftp to your own server for a while and I quite actively used that until it broke somehow and I couldnt figure out how to make it work again.
The bandwidth statistics on the server never got beyond 1 to 2 gb a day for the whole server, not just the images.
So I wonder how tatsus usage pattern looks like xD

here is one such add, and I can assure you : you may do no such thing on dropbox

It's great how you think the whole world is part of your family.

Yeah, it is very questionable.
But tatsujb uses those images in his sig and he's just about in every thread, so...
But so are you, and according to imgur, you "only" get 225 per day on the pic in your sig with a max of 250, so disregard my calculation completely.

oh you can view such statistics?

Yeah, go to the URL without the "i." in front of it and you can click "stats". https://imgur.com/ITW9wJL

well a little below 700 views on average per day since I uploaded it one year ago. More than I would have thought, but by far not enough to break any limits.

Genetically we're all going to have a common ancestor somewhere down the line. Unless you're a silicon-based blob from a shadow biosphere.