Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

How does Dropbox support quantify demand? +1's here?

Sadly they weren't very specific about how they calc demand, I guess it is not an exact science. This is what I got back from support:

"I have forwarded your feedback to our client (desktop app) team, who are looking further into this. Initially, we will start to track this to try to estimate the demand is for this type of feature, and also to collect more use cases like yours that will help us to better understand how to improve Selective Sync. That will then help us determine how to best proceed."

+1

Dropbox is almost unusable for me without this feature. On the off-chance that it's useful, here's my particular usecase and how I'd like to see it solved.

I use npm a lot, its npm install command can create thousands of files very quickly. Dropbox then spends a long time trying to index all these files, during that time CPU usage is pegged at 100% and the fans on my laptop will be (noisily) spinning at maximum. I may delete, add or recreate all of these files several times during a day.

I'd like to be able to ignore all changes to files within a folder, based on a folder-name pattern. I never want to store these files on the dropbox server as they are trivial for me to recreate locally. I don't want to have to manually select each folder to be ignored.

e.g. the pattern node_modules/ would ignore any changes in any folder in my dropbox called node_modules.

This could either be via a file dropped into a folder (See git's .gitignore file for an example) or as a config setting within the dropbox client or web interface.

If I start ignoring a folder that is already stored on the Dropbox servers, I think I'd like Dropbox to delete the remotely stored files (this could be dangerous, maybe there's a better solution) and stop updating any other clients. The icon of the ignored folder should change to show that it's being ignored.

Got tired of not having this, now using BitTorrent Sync for the files where I needed it the most. They do this with a IgnoreFile: http://sync-help.bittorrent.com/customer/portal/articles/1673122-ignoring-files-in-sync-ignorelist-

It's not great, but it gets the job done... and that's what counts.

My Case
While it isn't that different from many others, it should be helpful here nonetheless. I'm a developer. I run online browser games, and I build the odd website for clients too. In modern web design, the node_modules folder is a frequent creation within my Dropbox folder.

Why Dropbox?
Primarily it's awesome for being able to easily restore previous versions of a file if I screw up, and of course for backup, and the ability to access files from anywhere.

Why do I need .dropboxignore?
node_modules contains thousands upon thousands of small code files in packages created by other developers. It slows Dropbox to a crawl, and consumes an aggressive amount of CPU (Mac OS 10.10). These node_modules packages are easily replaceable at any time, so are not needed within Dropbox. I would like for node_modules to be automatically ignored by Dropbox whenever I create a new web project without having to manually fumble through Selective Sync.

There are so many use cases for this...

• you could create 'temp' folders wherever you want (so no need to have all your temp files outside the main directory structure which is on dropbox).
• any developer would gladly put on the ignore list all the temporary objects and binaries that are constantly generated during development ('node_modules' included)
• any video / media creator would not want to save her intermediates (which are usually very heavy in size). Think of preview files when working with After Effects/Premiere/3ds Max etc.
• in a shared folder, sometimes each contributor to the folder wants to have her own version of the files without constantly overwriting the 'master' copy (much like source control).

Yes +1

+1

My dropbox spends hours at a time looking like this:

And Activity Monitor spends a lot of time looking like this: