Sorting by IP address seems to work pretty well. I don't see any need to have people typing in IP addresses, when they can just select them from a list.

Someone else posted this a while back when I was asking about this same problem. He said to make a new shortcut to your Freelancer executable and then amend it include the ip address of the server you are trying to contact.

Here's mine for example:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Freelancer\EXE\Freelancer.exe" -sXXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:2302

Notice the -s that you must put in before the ip address and then specify the port (2302 is default).

Hope this helps.

Cool! Any other commandline switches that work? Where did you hear about that one?

There is a file in the same directory as Freelancer.exe called FLDirectIP.hta. It is a little wrapper for the -s command line switch.

I put a shortcut to that on my start menu and use that when I want to manually add servers to the list.

When using a manually added server it doesn't matter if you choose LAN or Internet; the server will be pinged regardless. If I just want to go to one server, I choose LAN so it won't try to get the server list from the global server. However, the server won't show up in the list until it responds to a ping, so you'll see a blank list to begin with.

Glad it helped.

I got the info from someone else here on these boards but I don't remember who it was.

I'm glad I could pass it along and help someone else out.