I know that this suggestion was thought of a long while back, but I do think that this would be a good feature to add in sooner or later. Being able to search published brews that others have made without needing to go through a third party forum would be much appreciated.
#Searching Published Brews
frosty bramble
olive yoke
hi (typing more, i just hate the wavy hand "start the conversation" bubble that appears on new threads)
The rough consensus on this kind of thing amongst the regular contributors to homebrewery, as I understand it, is that this is fairly low priority. One note right away before even really getting into the why:
HB is an open-source volunteer effort, of roughly 5 or so regular contributors, so there are a variety of opinions on this that range from "no" to "absolutely yes", so don't let me be an 'official discourager'.
My opinion is that a Search function doesn't add much to HB, and doesn't outweigh the costs. The costs are basically just the time to design and develop.
My thought is, what is wrong with third party forums?
Many people use the subreddit r/unearthedarcana to share their brews, which has some great advantages. You can read and post comments on the brew, you can see the overall reception of the brew (as indicated by votes), and the subreddit provides some level of focus on the content....meaning the d&d stuff is in the d&d community.
Further, you can use a regular search engine to search a place like Reddit (site:reddit.com paladin orc). You can search the authors previous posts as well to get more related content.
If I have non-d&d content, like for Savage Worlds or even for something not related to TTRPGs at all, I can post in any other established community.
So I'm not sure what real benefit there is to adding a search function to HB. There are thousands of brews that are absolutely junk, not because the author is necessarily bad but because they are just testing HB out, or experimenting with something, making a quick meme, etc. Yes, there is a "Publish" button, but for 5+ years now that has only made the brew 'viewable' by others but nothing else....so some people may have it published but haven't really thought about it as "public".
Overall, I think HB is best as a tool, just like MS Word or Photoshop or any desktop program.....you use it to create, and leave the dissemination to programs/websites that are much better equipped to publish.
worthy terrace
The rule of thumb for assessing priority has pretty consistently been "Will this change make Homebrewery a better editor?" PRs that add features that make Homebrewery a better platform are a much lower priority, although they usually eventually get through.
drifting timber
As another contributor, let me add that I'm somewhat warmer to the idea.
It has been something that has been low priority for quite a while, though it was always in mind (note the Published/Unpublished flag on each brew, and the note in the brew metadata panel: "Published homebrews will be publicly viewable and searchable (eventually...)")
This idea was hindered in part by the (otherwise successful) development of the "save on gdrive" feature. See, that feature was prompted (partly or mostly) by the urgent need to offload storage requirements .. but in doing so it resulted in a situation where THB no longer knew of all the brews. That put the kybosh on the idea of "searching brews". This deficit was fixed relatively recently by a behind-the-scenes dev effort to implement "brew stubs" (there were other reasons too).
Development of the Brew Tags feature was also driven by the idea of making brews searchable, which is why effort was put in to support a standardised tag type taxonomy (again, behind the scenes, albeit with some extra work needed to surface that).
vestal summit
Happy to report, that i have a working draft for this feature
i will keep posting updates here as i make progress towards its completion.
vestal summit
this has evolved and fixed a bunch of errors
vestal summit