Drop Box issue

[Kajaboss]

Hi all, I use an upgraded Mac Pro early 2008 with Yosemite 10.10.5.

The issue is I used to have a Dropbox account which I used on a regular basis. Then one day I received an email saying that my free account was due to expire. I ignored this, it didn't make sense that my account would have an expiry date! I have since discovered that I no longer appear to have an account. I can't login or get a password retrieval. When I go to the Dropbox website, all the webpage info is in html with various commands and links running down the left hand side of the screen in blue text. I tried another link and found the website where I have tried various links to contact support all of which unsurprisingly go nowhere or lead me straight back to the html pages. I am at a loss as to how a) contact the company or b)open another account. Can anyone tell me of similar experiences or offer any clues as to what I should do?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Dropbox requirements are macOS from 10.10 Yosemite to 10.14 Mojave. You are within that range and so the Dropbox app should continue to work. The free account doesn't expire, but it can be terminated for various violations or if it wasn't use for 12 consecutive months. It doesn't sound like a lack of usage was the issue.

Go back to the email you received and re-read that and share whatever you can here so we can guide you.

As far as support goes, free accounts only get email support, paid accounts get chat as well. You have to have a business account to get phone support.

All of this requires you to login to the Dropbox.com site to initiate the request. What browser and version are you using? Make sure it is the newest version of that browser.

 

[Kajaboss]

Dropbox requirements are macOS from 10.10 Yosemite to 10.14 Mojave. You are within that range and so the Dropbox app should continue to work. The free account doesn't expire, but it can be terminated for various violations or if it wasn't use for 12 consecutive months. It doesn't sound like a lack of usage was the issue.

Go back to the email you received and re-read that and share whatever you can here so we can guide you.

As far as support goes, free accounts only get email support, paid accounts get chat as well. You have to have a business account to get phone support.

All of this requires you to login to the Dropbox.com site to initiate the request. What browser and version are you using? Make sure it is the newest version of that browser.

Thankyou so much for your comprehensive reply. I'm using Google Chrome Version 74.0.3729.157, which apparently is up to date. The most recent email I can find is dated back to June 2017. I know I had Dropbox more recently than that but can't find any email to support that. Even if I had let the account lapse for more than 12 months (I use it more often than that), I would expect to a) be able to at least open a new account from the website or b) download the app, neither of which I am able to do. I have tried at least 6 times to upload the app from the link but it fails instantly to upload every time. When I try to start a new account and click the link to do that, it takes me an html page where the next link does nothing.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

That is indeed the latest version of Chrome and same one I'm running. I can see all of the content of the Dropbox site without any issues. You can grab the installer from this link. Are you getting specific errors when you try to download the Dropbox app?

 

[Kajaboss]

I've clicked on your link and it opens a new page which is blank and nothing else happens. I've clicked on the email support link on the html page I keep getting and that takes e to another html page where i am asked for my email and password, neither of which work. I've even been to the Community link on the website and when I searfor support with this issue, I am taken straight back to the html page and asked for a password and my email.!!!!!!!

 

[Raz0rEdge]

This is very odd indeed. Have you tried Safari? You should also try Chrome in Incognito mode and Safari in Private mode to see if you get different results. You should also try clear all the browser data in Chrome to see if that helps in any way.

 

[Kajaboss]

I have actually tried what you suggest and have cleared all my browsing history, with no change evident aswell as trying an incognito window with the same result. On the Dropbox website I click the link to download the app, which then takes me to a new page and voila, this is blank. I am totally befuddled by this and clueless as to what to do next.

 

[Raz0rEdge]

You get the same behavior in Safari as well? If so, on the blank page, in Chrome, can you right click and choose "Show Page Source" which should open a new tab with content, if you see not much at all that explains the blank page, if you see a lot of stuff, then something is really weird.

Do you get this blank page or issues with other websites or only Dropbox?

 

[Kajaboss]

Yes I get the same behaviour in Safari as well. I also noticed a thread on the Dropbox forum (when I typed in the issue into Google) of people having this problem back in 2015!! Dropbox said they were working on a fix for 10.10.5 users. Since I cant access the forum I have no way of contacting them to ask what to do!
Hopefully the images here will explain some of the issue

 

[Raz0rEdge]

OK, you are missing the CSS which likely means that you are either blocking or being blocked by the site that contains that code. That site or something similar also likely houses the actual Dropbox download.

I'm not sure how technically savvy you are, but let's try a little bit of sleuthing.

In Chrome, open up the Developer Tools (Option+CMD+i) and select the Network tab. If you see any content in there, hit the Circle with the diagonal line next to the Red dot on top to clear the contents. Now load or re-load the Dropbox site and you will see a number of requests and responses. For the Status column, you ideally want to see 200 in there and in the Waterfall column will be a green bar. Any place you see 404 or a red bar indicates that your browser had an error accessing something.

Once you get a few of these logs, click on the red dot to STOP recording any further transactions and now you can scroll around and see what's going on. Look at the Name of the failing (404 and/or red bar) lines to see what they say. If it contains the ending .CSS, that would explain the graphics issue you have. Take note of the URL/Domain that is being used to access that content and we can investigate that further.

Additionally, do you have any extensions running on your browser or network limiting software outside? If so, do you have blocks/gates enabled that prevent a website to jump to multiple sites to get its content? A lot of websites that have a LOT of traffic will put static assets (images, CSS, scripts, audio, downloads) on different sites or subdomains than the primary site to avoid bottlenecks. For example, you visit dropbox.com, but it's assets could be on assets.dropbox.com or some other CDN (Content Delivery Network) that has a totally different domain and if your extension says you are visiting dropbox.com and I will only allow stuff from dropbox.com, then all other access will fail and you get bad output on the screen.

 

[Kajaboss]

Ok mI have tried to navigate my way through your instructions. I have attached a desk snapshot of what I see at the point where you ask about .css red lines I don't think there were any 404s . When I hover the cursor over a line it shows a URL but they are different

 

[Raz0rEdge]

OK, the failed scenarios is why you have no styling on the page. My guess is that the failing to download of Dropbox is related to that. From the look of it, you are totally not accessing any part of the Dropbox site, some of the files were being cached locally and being loaded from there, if that weren't the case, you'd be looking like a total error screen.

 

[Kajaboss]

What causes this kind of melt down. I have never come across this before, this total blocking of access to a website. Is it something I have done unwittingly?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

The way I've seen this manifest is if you were to say add the Dropbox.com domain in your /etc/hosts file and point it to localhost (127.0.0.1). This essentially kills access to the site. While a manual way, there are many apps (Little Snitch for one) that essentially do the same thing with a prettier UI. That application allows you to selectively block access to (what it's meant to do) advertising or bad sites on the web. However, you can make it restrict access to any site you want.

I'm not suggesting that you have done it, but if you do have any sort of filtering/monitoring tool, that would be the place to check.

If Dropbox is the ONLY one having issues and no other site, you should then figure out if it's an ISP thing. Depending on who your ISP is, they might be blocking it for some reason.

The other thing you might want to try is go into your Network Settings in Sys Prefs and for your connection (WiFi or Wired), go to the DNS settings tab and use Google's DNS' of 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 to see if bypassing your ISP gets you going again.