Problem
I was trying to download an old shared link from over 10 years ago, and it didn’t work. The download page was fine, the file was still available, but whenever I clicked on the download button, the file simply won’t download, silently. If you attempt to download it from a logged in account, the only difference is that there’s a pop-up telling that the download has started, though it still wounldn’t start.
It turns out that, those old download links look like this:
https://www.box.com/s/shared file code
while the modern download links are sligthly different:
https://app.box.com/s/shared file code
The difference is that old links do have “www” at the beginning, while the modern links have “app” instead.
Solution
The “app” links load a slightly different page which works fine, the “www” links show an outdated page which simply doesn’t work. If you take an existing “www” link which doesn’t work, and replace the “www” with “app”, the formerly broken download now magically works.
It would be nice if the Box developers did a simple redirect on each attempt to load a “www” page, to its working “app” equivalent, so even the more unexperienced users can download the files without issues.
I’ve found this solution on my own, by opening this account, sharing a dummy file and inspecting the whole process as well as the share link format.
I’ve read user reports in the community who had similar issues, as well as staff responses which suggested useless procedures at best, to subscribe to a paid plan at worst, which as well are completely useless procedures and would also take money away from those users which don’t really want/need a paid plan.
Simply the fact that I was forced to create a new account in order to find a solution to this issue is in itself a big disappointment I’ve got from the Box service.
I hope this will be fixed soon, this was not a very good first impression.
I’m not sure if I will ever use this account anymore, I mostly created it in order to download a file and to report the issue, there are other more reliable services I already use as cloud storages, I don’t need to use this… but at least whenever I find a Box shared link online, I wish for it to work as it should.
Thank you.