Sharing a link

A screenshot, a hands-free note or a screen recording can be uploaded and handed to somebody as a URL — Share a link, in History. It is a managed cloud feature, so it needs a Deixis account (see Free and Pro). The dialog asks two things: who the link is for, and how long it lives.

Which of the three the dialog starts on follows what this machine is acting as — see Teams and seats. It is only ever a preselection, and the audience is chosen per link.

The two gated audiences ask the reader to prove the address: they type it on the page, a six-digit code arrives in their inbox, and they enter it. No account, no app, nothing to install. That proof lasts 30 days in that browser — a colleague reading a series of shared links signs in once, and can sign out from the page footer — and every page view asks again whether that address may see this share, so removing somebody from a team closes their access on their next view.

Specific people are emailed the link when the share is made, each of them, with the title and the expiry. A team share is mailed to nobody: you send the URL yourself, and only members can open it.

The audience and the recipient list are fixed when the link is made. There is no switch to widen or narrow one afterwards, and that is a property of the link rather than a policy: the URL is stored only as a hash, so nothing on our side can re-mail it to somebody added later, and nothing can take it back from somebody who already has it. A different audience is a different link.

Expiry stays mandatory in all three modes — 1 to 90 days. Retention is what bounds the cost of this feature, and an identity gate is not a reason to keep bytes for ever. The optional password composes with each audience rather than replacing it: identity first, then the password.

Revoking. Every link you have made is in Shared, its own place in the rail, and a link shared with a team says so on its own row. A team's owner or admin may revoke any link shared into that team; a member only their own. Uploading and publishing stay with the author.