Five of the eight sort options rebuild the list. Three of them, Relevance, Magic and Most Viewed, carry no order of their own. Choosing one sends no ordering at all, so you get whatever order the page you are on already uses. That is why the three often produce an identical list, and why the answer changes depending on which Projects page you are looking at.
Five sorts name a field, three name nothing
Most Recent, Most Popular, Most Discussed, Top Rated and A-Z each name something to sort by: the date the project was created, its likes, its comments, its rating score, its title. Pick one of those and the list is rebuilt around it, the same way every time.
Relevance, Magic and Most Viewed name nothing. They are passed to the page as a blank, and the page fills the blank in.
What the blank turns into, page by page
- Projects, the page at uni.xyz/projects, is the Editorial feed. Magic drops you at a randomly chosen page of the list rather than the top. Relevance and Most Viewed both give you newest first.
- Trending is already ranked by how many people opened each project in the last 30 days, so all three give you exactly that ranking. Most Viewed is an honest label here, and it is what the page opens on.
- Award Winning gives you newest first on all three.
- All Projects is the one to avoid. This feed has no order of its own, so all three ask for a list in no particular order. It is not shuffled in a useful way, it is unstable: scrolling can show you the same project twice and skip others entirely, and reloading gives a different arrangement. Choose Most Recent on this page.
- Search treats Relevance differently. There it is not a blank at all, it switches the page to a different search engine. Magic and Most Viewed both fall back to Most Recent.
Each page opens on a different sort
The Projects page opens on Magic, Trending opens on Most Viewed, and everything else opens on Most Recent. So the sort you are looking at is rarely one you chose, and moving between feeds changes it under you.
What to pick
If you want a list you can scroll once without repeats, or come back to and find in the same order, choose one of the five that names a field. Most Recent is the safe answer on every page.
Magic is worth choosing on the Projects page and nowhere else, because that is the only page where it does anything.