I am quite an avid homebrewer and really enjoy sharing my stuff with the community and getting feedback. However, the current way of browsing and searching through homebrew is terrible for newer or updated creations.

One of my oldest creations is a fairly popular artificer subclass based on summoning and supporting constructs. I finally received enough feedback to update the class and made a newer version. Afterwards, the adds still showed the same number, but when sorting all homebrew based on adds it ended up at the bottom of the list. I am not sure how everyone browses through homebrew, but I usually sort based on adds or rating or by searching for a specific title (which has it's own problems I will get into later). This makes it so homebrew that are actively being tested and improved actually end up less popular, which seems very strange to me.

This is also a problem for new homebrew. If you sort any category like this, you see that most of the top results are quite old. It makes sense as they had more time to build up popularity, but it is hard to sift through them before you get to newer creations that might be similar or even better in quality. As those are harder to find, they also receive less adds and in turn also fewer ratings, which also makes them less popular based on sorting by rating as well. If you simply reverse the sorting with lowest adds first in the hopes of finding new stuff, you often find things that even the creator did not add themselves and things of really low quality. It would really help if you could sort on date of creation and even better if you could cross different statistics (like most adds over time or only search in recent additions).

Another way of searching for stuff is by using searching for a name, but there are a lot of problems with that too. The search bar only looks for the titles. Sometimes a creation is exactly what it says on the tin, but other times it is way more flowery. I use the search bar mostly when looking for "something sea-themed" or "some kind of polearm", but I often have to get through many synonyms and related words (like Ocean or Wave) before I find what I am looking for. I get that going through all the full texts is too much to handle, but just searching the titles is not enough. The tags already help with that, but they are quite messy, not applied to all categories and usually more about the function/mechanics, rather than flavor or themes. It also bugs me that I cannot create my own tags (or take some others previously used). Especially when "tag" and "tags" actually exist; "artificer" and "bard" do, but none of the other subclasses (as do some schools of magic, but not all); and "warm" and "negates difficult terrain" warrant their own tag, while being really niche.

I think that the homebrew parts of D&D Beyond are a great addition to the community, but deserve some more love. Here are some ideas and suggestions of what to change:

• Keep the virtual number of adds when updating homebrew, maybe even give an seal of approval on material or creators who actively listen to feedback and improve it, like: "This material has been play-tested or improved (though always discuss with your DM if and how you can use it)"
• Give more metrics to sort and sift through homebrew (like date of creation/most recent update). Preferably also allow multiple parameters to interact (like "created since" and "most adds").
• Apply the tag system everywhere and allow users to make additions to the tags (limit the total number of tags each creation can have if you must).
• Highlight or promote new or good material. Perhaps an article on "Mod's picks of the month" or a pinned creation in each category. Nerarchy did some videos and articles on homebrew from D&D Beyond which was entertaining an inspirational (though they used the same sorting as described above, so still discussed older material).