You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Status:
Investigating
Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync
Please please please can you add a feature that allows folders to be excluded from the Dropbox account (on windows and mac). For sure I'm not the first person to request this, but I'm yet to find a g...
Why won't Dropbox add a feature where you could automatically ignore files by name? I realize that this is a little bit of a niche feature, probably only needed by power users, but it would clearly be trivial to implement, and I've seen many users asking for this feature.
https://twitter.com/stormchild/status/453914697536794624
https://github.com/tkonolige/dbignore
http://superuser.com/questions/731583/can-i-specify-certain-files-for-dropbox-to-ignore
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/35474/does-dropbox-or-any-other-similar-solution-ignore-files-based-on-regexp
http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Dropbox-add-option-to-exclude-files-by-filetype-extension
https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/201289669-Ignore-folder-without-selective-sync-
You get the idea, several pages of Google results with people asking for a feature that would take probably less than a week for an engineer to implement.
I also desperately would like this feature. It would save money to Dropbox as it would not have to continuously synchronize and keep unlimited backups of temporary files each time I do a compilation in Visual Studio for example.
I totally agree with you that it is very trivial to implement.
Of course we could do it ourselves IF there was any API to hack with, but there is none for the Windows Desktop client. And the CLI interface on Linux is very limited. Having to build an alternative desktop client (assuming it were possible without sacrificing a lot of other features) just for this feature would be ridiculous. Ideally Dropbox could release the client as open source so we could tinker with it.
I have lost all hope in this matter, considering how they shut down Votebox a while ago and have not implemented any new feature for a long time (not even fixing certain bugs).