Suggestion regarding website usability, and the AUR

Question

Hey everyone, lately i've been doing some thinking on how to improve the website and integrating things as easily and best as possible. Before the flames on this being commercial software begin, just hear me out.
With minimal - no effort and hacking of the source code we can have these features:
· Single login/registration for everything below
· Announcements on front page piping automatically piping discussion to it's own thread in specified forum
· Blogs
· Gallery
· shared login with mediawiki
· An improved AUR system, with an accurate way to gauge package usage (which i'll describe and show below)
· Shop
· Donations system which displays in real time and adds user to a thank you page (unless they choose to be anonymous)
· Forum system lightyears better than phpbb (current info and userbase simple to import)
· Very powerful (and easy) administration/privelage system
· RSS Feeds on every Area you choose to have them for
· even our user map can be integrated with no effort
· mailing list threads piped to specified forum and vise versa
What i'm proposing is vBulletin. An owned license (one time lifetime fee) is only 160$, and i feel with the extra donations this is well worth it, in pretty much every way i can think of.
AUR system:
It probably will be easiest to show by example, so here it is - http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthre … did=108515 . The best feature this offers us (along of course with being centralized), is the way the voting would work. Right now, i know i'm guilty, but i just get too lazy and forget to always click to vote on a package i use. And also alot of the time i stop using said package.
With this system, you click install, when you have installed a package, the contributor can see exactly who installed and who hasnt (Which is good as a way to nudge people who post for support, yet havent clicked install/voted). People will be much more likely to vote/click install a package here, since doing so will enable them to be notified via email every time the package is updated. and when they uninstall and no longer wish to be notified of updates, they just click uninstall.
I know currently we have the rss feed for the aur which does similar, but afaik it only shows new packages and not updated ones?. Which can be a pain to always check to stay up to date.
Anyways, give it some thought. I've been using and hacking up vB for quite some time, so if you guys have any questions on other areas, just ask. I'm posting this to the mailing list as well. Don't take this as a flame on the current website efforts. I just feel this would make things easier to manage and stay organized, and better for the end user for the same reason.
Thanks for making it through my novel,
-- Chris O'Reilly

Answer 1

Ok guys, I'm gonna butt in here, I've seen this happen several times before.  While you can discuss all you want, I guarantee nothing will happen unless somebody actually chooses to do something. We talked for ages about a wiki, but it didn't happen until rasat set it up. We talked for ages about a NEW wiki, but that didn't happen until cactus set it up. We talked for ages about forum mods, but that didn't happen until dibble set it up. We talked for ages about Arch64 before syamajala and now andyRTR took on the project. We talked for ages about a custom kernel PKGBUILD before I and later dibble tackled the project. We've talked for ages about gui frontends to pacman and people have set them up and the project usually falls apart, barring jacman. and so on.
Now, if anyone is *serious* about this project, and I mean serious as in you've thought about it and realize that its HUGE, I would suggest one of two things:
1) talk to Judd and see if he has any ideas
2) start hacking something together and show it to Judd
Now, from previous experience in Arch-related development, I can guarantee that Judd won't just accept or assign someone to start this project. What he will do, however, is provide answers and feedback if someone is working on it, and if he likes the results, he will accept them as well. This is typical arch development.
I would say that since the website is such a visual first impression of Arch, Judd might want more input into it, but I doubt this is true.... if he was that concerned, something would have been done with the front page before now. ;-)
Basically, I'm saying talk all you like, but it won't do any good.
Dusty