Why is this community obsessed with Dropbox?

It seems like 60% of the tutorials and old forum posts I stumble across post their examples with Dropbox. While it's a great way to get files up very quickly and easily, Dropbox is highly unstable, and most of the links are broken, and alot of the comments and replies are unanswered requests for a repost. Why don't people use a more stable host, or upload their capx as an attachment to the forum post? It seems to me that there is little purpose in adding an example to a tutorial if the example is just going to disappear soon after the tutorial is created....

At that time dropbox was one of the easiest and fastest to use (and free of course) - it was before forum have an option to include files in posts as an attachments. Noone never forced anyone to use it, it was a users choice. Besides that you could use it to host your games (you still can if you have old account).

Disappearing link have nothing to do to with dropbox stability. It's just the users who deleted the files from dropbox or closed their accounts.

At that time dropbox was free and easy to use with few competitors. So was probably the best tool for the type of user that uses C2.

As for tutorials It's also been the responsibility of the author to store files, reply and keep it up to date. Which unfortunately doesnt always happen. Perhaps it would be useful to report issues of tutorials to scirra so it can be removed?

Dropbox allows an instant download without shoving misleading clickbaiting ads in your face (often with big "DOWNLOAD" buttons to confuse you from the real download button) and having an obnoxious timer countdown while trying to sell you a pro subscription before you can download the file, which was what pretty much every download site was like before Dropbox, so unsurprisingly it caught on. The obnoxious sites were actually frustrating enough when dealing with bug reports that for some time we officially requested that all bug reports host their files on Dropbox. Google Drive and OneDrive now provide that level of service too now though so there's choice now.

I use Dropbox for more than 5 years now and it never let me down. Today Google Drive and OneDrive could be better alternatives because of the amount of freely given online storage space.

I realize that dropbox is not intrinsically unstable, but Instabilities due to users forgetting their stuff and deleting it is still instability.

Perhaps there should be an initiative to clean up tutorials with broken links? I wouldn't mind having a go at enumerating the broken ones for mods to clean up. Perhaps I could even recreate a couple of them or message the original user, so if they are still around and still have the file, they can reupload as a forum attachment.

I appreciate the history. It makes it a lot less frustrating to know why. As a student, i don't mind dealing with ads on mediafire or whatever, but for debugging, wait free downloading is a must, especially since you probably have to grab multiple versions of the same capx.

I'll just add that I use Dropbox instead of uploading attachments because if I need to update a project *.capx then I can simply tweak the project from my desktop/laptop on the go and it'll automatically update for whomever downloads from then on. So there is that.

But I agree, if users cannot perform upkeep on their own tutorial listings, then they should get a certain amount of time to update the tutorial, and it should become, say "archived" and up for grabs for others to re-create like you, bladedpenguin or whoever wants a go at it. : )

Sounds to me like the most sensible thing is an auto-backup system where a user enters a link and the system copies the file to Scirra's server and offers a secondary download link. Every week or month or whatever it could auto-update - if it cannot find the file it just offers the latest available version.

I truly loves dropbox for it's HTML preview for my construct2 games. That was the only reason I used it in the first place. Google drive has this service too, but I don't like it

Dropbox is very stable. There's nothing you can do if the person who posts a link to a file removes it later. Any other file host could be used and there would be the same problem. I use dropbox for most of my uploaded capx files and I have no plans to transition to something else, since all the files all are still there.

Also the capx upload feature of the forum wasn't always there, which explains why many older posts didn't utilize it.

Also the capx upload feature of the forum wasn't always there, which explains why many older posts didn't utilize it.

Hell, the forum still doesn't let you upload .c2addon files - when the plugin/effect makers get tired of making zip files/clean their Dropbox or such the users will be screwed.

Successful program