R.J. Steinert

So if I am arriving at Farm Hack because I heard it could be a good place to find a solution to a problem on my farm, the default tool organization that I want to see would be tools by category, so I can find tools that are relevant to my farm or my problem (fruit growing tools aren't much use if I'm a dairy farmer, etc.).

I agree. It's also in the interest of Tool developers that the maximum amount of interested eyeballs find their tools quickly. According to [Raymond's version of Linus's Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus'_Law#By_Eric_Raymond), "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." So if we focus on building the search tools for Farm Hackers like myself who are interested in seeing where the action is, then a whole bunch of potential contributors might not be seeing what they are looking for. I think metrics like "# of wiki edits" and "# of forum posts" for a Tool are not first priority but second priority. After the user has somehow generated a list of results they are interested in, the participation metrics let the user know which ones are healthy. At the moment though and probably for the next few months, I think most people visiting the Tools section will not find anything necessarily useful to them. I think it's important to prove to those folks that if they have a Tool idea and make the effort to post it, that there will be an active community ready to jump in. So for now I'm kind of happy just having the current sort mechanism of "Last Tool Wiki Update" and perhaps when we do get more participation metrics on the Tools page we sort by one of those. Again, this is my thinking for a short term strategy while we are bootstrapping this community. I could be convinced otherwise, prioritizing long term is not that crazy of an idea :P.

As the list grows it will become far too time consuming to find anything.

For some examples of types of search, check out Section 9, "How will users find information?", in my [We believe in sharing](http://substance.io/rjstatic/we-believe-in-sharing) document. I think the answer as far as searching goes is giving users a whole array of options. Hopefully we will grow to the point where we need Full Text Search, as they say "a problem we would like to have," but if we implemented it right now it would lead users to a whole bunch of searches with "No results found".

Perhaps one way to help implement this would be to allow the tool’s creator and editors to add tags to the tool’s profile which can then be used as the basis for the search

I'm into this idea. We've spent time trying to see into the future and predict how Tools will be categorized, and I like what we have so far, but perhaps now it's time to let users start "freetagging" in a Keywords category on Tools. A tag cloud will show what keywords are the most popular and if we start to seem some category trends in the Keywords vocabulary then we may have a candidate for a new category on Tools. Converting a bunch of content with a set of Keywords into a new category takes a little leg work but it's definitely a problem we'd like to have.

Perhaps there can also be some sort of dropdown menu which will allow users to select how they wish the tools to be sorted.

At the moment you can sort on the Stage, Type, and Last Tool Wiki Update columns. I think I can turn that sorting into a dropdown menu fairly easily as well.

...tools which are receiving a large amount of community support will appear at the top of the list.

I'd love to see this as well and it's high on my priorities for implementation. See the usage metrics I mentioned below in response to Dorn's comment.