Disable desktop notifications for app's folder

[Thomas]

I'm using Dropbox Sync to write down small files to sync things in my iOS app. Because records and datastores are too limited in my case, I can't use Datastore. Unfortunately, these internal files are generating a lot of notifications on my desktop. It annoys the user. The solution is to disable sync of this folder on desktop computers, but it requires an additional step for the user (after having annoyed it). All of this is degrading user experience.

By nature, what happens inside an app folder is less likely to be of interest for an human user. It would be great if we were able to set our app folders as "notifications free" if relevant. One can also imagine per subfolder filtering. For now, my apps are mobile only, but if I want to make a desktop version and use Dropbox to sync stuffs, disabling app's folder sync will be impossible and users would have to live with dozens of garbage notifications. It would be so awful that it would prevent me to use Dropbox at all to sync with a desktop version (even if user would like to use Dropbox).

[Greg-DB]

Thanks for the feature request! I'm sending it along now.

[Manuel K.2]

I couldn't agree more! This has basically rendered the new Recent Files feature on the iOS app useless... It is filled with file changes unimportant to me!!

[Jan_Zeman]

Hello, the same here. Isn't this an extremely obvious case? Should not these desktop notifications be switched off BY DEFAULT? It seems this feature request is sitting there for 1/2 a year - any chance it will be possible to switch off the notifications on all the clients OS for the given DropBox app? It should be the given app (if installed on the given OS) that handles the updates but not the user - it would generate only his/her frustrations... Greg or anybody from DB, can you please give a status update on this? Thank you very much in advance, Jan

[Greg-DB]

Sorry, no update on this right now.

[Jan_Zeman]

Hi Gregory, may I ask what does "no update" mean? I guess DropBox has some internal tracking system of bugs and feature requests... Is this feature request originally introduced by Thomas anywhere in that system? Is there ANY chance it will get implemented? I have been living with these notifications for the last 2 months... As a feedback for me as a developer it is a useful side-effect... as a user, nothing can annoy me more. I am afraid many people will feel it the same way. Thanks and have a nice day, Jan

[Greg-DB]

Hi Jan, by "no update" I just meant that I didn't have any news to share yet. We do track all feature requests for the API, including the requests for this feature from the three different developers on this thread, including yourself. 

Anyway, we generally try not to promise anything until it's delivered, in case plans change, but this is something we hope to release. In fact, it's currently in the new API v2 preview as the "mute" parameter, but I can't promise that it will remain part of the final release or work correctly, since it is just a preview right now.

[Jan_Zeman]

Hi Gregory, thank you, this post is much more informative. I understand completely your statement about non-promises - I usually keep exactly the same approach. Appreciated, thanks!

[Joe C.56]

As a user and a potential developer, this also annoys me. It seems like a simple use case. I use an app called ember and it's constantly writing files to my dropbox folder. That's awesome, but that also pushes actual files I'm working with out of my list in the menubar, and constantly shows me popups about files being added and deleted. So I guess I'd like to fourth this in the hopes of getting some traction on this.

It would also be generally helpful to hide notifications when I'm working on projects with other people who are rendering frame sequences so I don't see a notification for every little group of frames that come in.

I'm glad to see that you're working on it. I hope it's not just available in the API but also as a preference for the basic users as well—that way I don't have to wait for a developer to add mute functionality.

[Érico C.]

I'm surprised this still isn't a thing. It should have been added long ago already.

In my case, I have a shared folder with several people who keep adding stuff all the time to a certain folder, and it's really annoying. I'd like to disable notifications for that particular folder. The only current way to do this is disable it from syncing, but then it also deletes all the folder's contents from my computer, which makes no sense to me.