To defend Dropbox here, those people are forum moderators and not employees of Dropbox. The first Dropbox employee to respond specifically apologized for those responses. Jumping on Dropbox for this is just going to harm other companies responding to customer support requests in a timely fashion before lawyers get a chance to review...
> "those people are forum moderators and not employees of Dropbox"
They're official representatives of Dropbox, even if they are unpaid. Their behavior is entirely on Dropbox, and the fact that Dropbox has farmed out its customer support to unpaid amateurs is possibly a worse realization than the fact that the clueless person was not an employee.
Eh not really. They are community volunteers. The best part is that they can give free support in the forums without pay, and then when something esclates and they've done something wrong an actual employee can wash their hands of the situation (as they've done here) by stating they aren't actually employed by the company.
So it's a win win for Dropbox. Free forum support for low level day to day forum chatter and easily absolvable of any wrongdoing if they screw up.
That's the price of trying to provide a vital service free with some clueless, non-paid "customers". I mean, frontpage of HN with zillion upvotes and comments, after you fail to support customers.
Whether it's a win or loss for Dropbox depends on the public's reaction to it. I'm totally with potatolicious here: It's a dropbox site, and these people have a special status (moderator) which I automatically assume is conferred upon them by Dropbox. So their behavior is "on" dropbox- whether dropbox wants it to be or not. Even if my assumption is wrong, it's still on Dropbox.
The only question is, are people going to hold them accountable or not (by finding other solutions). I don't use them (I do my own syncing) and this display warns me off of starting to use them any time in the near future.
