Not Issues

These are "issues" that actually work as designed.

All Platforms

Shared folder takes up everyone's space: Expected behaviour is that it only counts against the quota of the shared folder's owner.

Solution: Aside from the ability to invite and kick people out, everyone has full access to the files within the shared folder. Those files also take up space on each user's hard drives, so there are bandwidth costs associated with transferring the files to everyone. There are also considerations about abuse, where someone could link numerous free accounts together to sidestep the quota. There have been numerous proposed solutions to this issue, all of which have advantages and disadvantages. Group accounts will be implemented in the future to serve organizations which use Dropbox's shared folders for internal file distribution. See the forum discussion for details.

Public Links are 404: Public links return 404 Not Found error even though the link is correct.

Solution: First make sure your file has actually completed uploading. If the link had previously worked but not anymore: Dropbox uses an automated abuse prevention system which moderates the bandwidth usage of accounts/clients/public files. Your account was probably flagged for excessive usage. Your usage may indeed be perfectly reasonable depending on the situation, so contact a Dropboxer about the specifics. Contacting them will also help refine the monitoring program to reduce false positives.