Factorio Forums

Steps to reproduce:

Go to the Mods menu from the main screen.
Go to install tab.
Filter by any string that has enough results.
Click on Downloads column header.

Expected result:
All of the entries in the list are properly sorted by download count in descending order.

Actual result:
There is some attempt at sorting, but it fails to produce the correct result. There are multiple points where this problem is made apparent.

Images: Log:

Thanks for the report. When searching the ordering is based off the search text and not the column ordering: to better match what was searched for.

Rseding91 wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 2:09 pm Thanks for the report. When searching the ordering is based off the search text and not the column ordering: to better match what was searched for.

[1.1.61]
The sort grouping still doesn't make sense.

Here I am searching for "fast" and ordered by download count. It took me a bit but I realize the initial grouping is based on "fast" being at the beginning of the mod's internal ID, not the title.


The next grouping of results seems to be if "fast" is in the mod ID, but not at the beginning.


Only then do we get "fast" being in the title?


And lastly, it groups by "fast" being in the description.



IMHO, this is too complicated. I would expect anything with "fast" in the title and/or ID at the top, then maybe a 2nd grouping of "fast" within the description. Alternatively, have it only search title and ID with a user selectable option to also search descriptions and remove the grouping altogether. As is, the searching is difficult to figure out.

Here's another vote for it being a bug. An example of how the current behaviour doesn't help: filtering by "train" and sorting by downloads puts LTN off the screen, below Seablock, even though it's a train mod with train in the name, with more downloads than Seablock (which doesn't mention trains in the name or description - I am guessing it shows up because the author has Train in his name?). It's counterintuitive because it doesn't do what all other software does when you sort by column. Another example: filter by "ltn" and sort by downloads - the LTN mod itself, the one with the most downloads, isn't the top result.

Another vote for not not a bug. Search+Sort is mostly useless for my use cases.

Especially weird that sorting by name doesn't work.

Suggestion: When searching, set the sort criterion to null and do the current behavior, but go back to sorting if the user clicks a column header.

+1 for improving the filtering/sorting in the mod browser. It's currently too fuzzy and unclear why certain (many) results are displayed for a given string of text.

Whole word matches in the mod title should be top results, then in description and then fuzzy matches (stemming?), but fuzzy matching needs to be reined in more. 90% of search results are currently unrelated and due to the weird sorting it's unclear which ones are relevant and which ones aren't.

Example search: "plates"

Sample of results (the relative ordering here is the same as the actual results):

• Space Exploration Postprocess (Required) -- top result, but completely irrelevant to my search, "plates" doesn't occur anywhere in the title or the description so I guess it's a fuzzy match, clearly shouldn't be the #1 result
• Text Plates -- second result, highly relevant, great!
• Playtime+ -- completely irrelevant, again it's a fuzzy match
• Even More Text Plates -- highly relevant
• Industrial Display Plates -- highly relevant
• simple_water_rail_with_collision_rewrite -- completely irrelevant
• Armor plates: Extended Compatibility -- highly relevant
• Player count based research speed and productivity -- completely irrelevant
• Display Plates -- highly relevant, but it's not even on the first page, you have to scroll to see this

Total number of search results, based on (650px scroll gutter height - 30px scrollbar height) / 8px per page (22 items)) = 1700

Sorry for the late reply. I kept going back to this and eventually realized that although searching re-orders things, it then breaks trying to sort columns *after* searching has finished. I believe I've fixed it for the next release.