Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

+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.