I personally think it's quite difficult to find files on Simtropolis, because there are so many of them. I think there are two things that can be done to help find things much easier.
1. Choose a time range for files in the category view.
As of today if you go into the "most downloaded" or "most viewed" view for a category most of the assets will be from 2004 - 2006. There's a lot of nice assets on there obviously. But, I hope we can all agree that more recent assets are higher quality. This is simply because asset creators have become better at making assets, they spend more time on a single asset and have access to better tools. It's more difficult to find those assets, because the new assets don't manage to collect as many views or downloads. The older assets have had years of head start on that front.
This is why I think we should be allowed to set a time range for the submitted date for files in the category view. Then we could set the "sorty by" to eg. most downloaded or most viewed. This way it'd be easy to see the best files for a given year or a range of years. I think it should be rudamentary and you just select one year as a whole instead of selecting specific dates. To make this less computationally complex and to save the money spent on the servers, the list for each year could be regenarated every month or so. The most recent year could be regenarated once a day or once a week. It wouldn't be perfect but definitely be accurate enough.
I'm aware that as of right now you can go into my streams page and you can set the time range to whatever you like, however, that page doesn't sort the assets according to the downloads or views so you're looking at all assets from a time range chronologically.
2. More subcategories
I've talked about this on the S4 Evermore Discord with a couple of people and I think it'd be a great feature to add subcategories for SimCity 4 files.
For example, it's rather difficult to find train stations, because they reside in the vague Transport category. I think the whole category could be split into train stations, bus stations, metro stations, parking stations, and "other" category.
I've done some digging and it would be possible to not only create new subcategories to the website, but also to automatically sort all the existing files. All that would be required to do so is to get the exemplars from .lot, .bat, and .dat files for each updloaded file. The DBFP would have to be decrypted. The methods for doing so can be found in many existing open source projects such as:
https://github.com/Killeroo/SC4Parser
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ilive-reader/
Then you can read in the necessary values such as the Occupant Group from the exemplar. The occupant group then allow you to figure out what kind of a transport asset it is and sort it into an appropriate subcategory.
The subcategorization of the website could be taken a step further. Buildings could be split up based on density or the wealth levels. When submitting a new file the user could be asked to choose a relevant subcategory. There would be no necessity to run the scripts again.
I think the website is pretty good as it is, but it could definitely be made better. This is just my 0.02$.
