Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

[Tom_M]

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 good explanation of why it's not there. A quick google search reveals loads of people also looking for the same feature. I really like the workflow I have with dropbox, but it's getting to the point where I might switch providers in order to allow better selective sync.

I've seen hackish solutions using selective sync, but it would be great if this could be done in one of the following ways:
- global pattern matching eg "node_modules"
- a marker file in the directory like .dropboxignore
- a simple right click context menu "Ignore this folder"

Other than that, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Tom

[Emma]

Hi folks, 

Thanks for your feedback on this.
While ignored files delivers for some of the use cases here, I appreciate it does not for all. 
We'll be taking another review of this thread to isolate use cases for a .dropboxignore file feature in particular.

I've updated the status and we'll take this to the product team.
As a side note, it would be helpful for us if you could outline the gap between what ignored files offers, and what a .dropboxignore file feature would add to your workflows.

Thank you.

[madmax00178]

@Emma I have to just post, this is becoming a major issue for me. I've been a Dropbox customer for about 10 years now, but because I've stepped more into the development side of things, not having an ignore pattern file is causing all sorts of issues.

You asked for people to explain why this is important:

I already have a script that goes through and sets the ignore flag on `node_modules` folders in my Programming folder. But when switching branches, I will sometimes need to delete `node_modules` and reinstall packages with npm. When this happens, in the few minutes before my automatic script runs, Dropbox tries to sync the folder and I've had a few times where this can cause some serious issues.

Honestly, I can't imagine this is very hard to do. Please ask the development team to prioritize this. I will start my search for an alternative anyway, because I don't have much faith this will get addressed after 98 pages of comments.