What is "Public documents"

I may be asking this in the wrong place, but I couldn’t find anywhere better…

When I am in the sharing sidebar for a document, and typing the name of who to share with, one of the popup options is “Public documents”. If I share to this, who am I actually sharing with?

Is it everyone who has an account on my Nextcloud? Or is it the same as sharing a public link? Or what?

I have Googled ‘Nextcloud “Public documents”’ and found nothing relevant.

I suspect this feature appeared when I upgraded to the latest version, but I’m not sure. I have the group folders app installed - is that where it comes from?

It is possible to create a “public” link to a document. Anyone with the link can access the document, even without a username and password. However, the link is a random string of characters so very unlikely to be guessed.

If I choose Public Documents from the share list, I get this…

image

This does not appear to relate to your answer in any way (I think you are referring to “Share link”).

For what it is worth, I don’t see “Public Documents” (as shown in your screenshot) on my instance of Nextcloud 17.

Really sorry, this was a user error - we had a user with login “public” and name “Public Documents”. No idea who put it there, or why. Never occurred to me that someone would do such a thing!