Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

Additionally. If you’re a programmer and running lots of git hub projects, there are better systems to be adopted than Dropbox? You don’t really want to use a live Dropbox for programming I would have thought 

Good points here, although most are related to your particular environment but I do understand. I have a list of projects (call them folders) that are current, and have triggers (works on windows with powershall and Mac with .. Mac stuff) and they trigger whenever the program is open. I’m a civil engineer so in my case it’s 12d and AutoCAD. Anytime I open a 12d project inside folder x (one that’s on the list) do not sync happens straight away, and that project is then ‘checked out’ until I ve finished and it does the reverse once closed after 5 mins idle time. This works great for me, I rarely even think about it nowadays. I love the whole project gets taken off then put back on, a new complete revision gets made, the Dropbox automations can be used here too, really good. Every time I try one of the competitors out when I’ve got the Dropbox **bleep**s on, I very quickly return to my dear Dropbox with much love and enthusiasm, cause the others, are rubbish let’s face it. Unless you go down a resilio kind of thing but even then, there are lots of things I don’t like. Each to there own I suppose. 

Well said.  They will not allow a thumbs up so this is it.   👍

I just got a "message" saying I earned a star from DB because of a submission about this a few years ago (along with all the others).    

I really should quit DB because of the stupidity of this issue, but it has been a useful tool for almost 15 years.  It handles some things so well but this issue of being unable to control the updating of what are purely temporary files is ridiculous, and ignoring it for so long makes me wonder why I should bother.  It may be time to move on.

this is so ironic. few years ago I stopped using dropbox and switched to something else for two reasons: the desktop client was using a huge amount of memory and the lack of a .ignore file. Today i got an email from dropbox giving me a badge for writing in thi thread many years ago... "You've just captured the Spirit of the Dropbox Community! This badge is to show how much we here at Dropbox Appreciate all you do! Thank you". Even if they implement .ignore I would never go back to dropbox.

11 years and still no practical solution to ignore files and folders.

+1

I would love to put my code projects into a dropbox sync area, and I don't mind creating an extra dropbox ignore file so that the auto-generated code and/or dependency package locations do not make noise in dropbox. (ie, regularly re-created or destroyed files can fill delete/recovery history with noise)

Would love to see a .dropboxignore to exclude files and folders by pattern. The current method of excluding one by one is tedious.

Happy 10-year anniversary Dropbox idea.

10 years without ANY progress on something that should be so easy to implement. Fortunately there are now other options, like syncthing and Koofr that support .gitignore style ignore folders.

I've written the article on the subject: Dropbox: How to Ignore Users for 10 Years (Dropbox doesn't allow to put a link in a comment so here it is: https://dev.to/melanchall/dropbox-how-to-ignore-users-for-10-years-hdn). There Dropbox will find (it it wants) all the required info about what we need and what pain we have.

It's just a nonsense to ignore us for such a long time.