What's your idea?
There are a number of projects that have NO release, NO activity and are years old that should either be moved to a sandbox, or outright deleted. These were created pre-sandbox days, although some have been created recently.
As the current maintainer of a few of these projects, I have no way to delete them. I can see why you wouldn't want to give maintainers the power to delete projects with releases (even old releases such as 4.x). We want code to always be publically available so it might be refactored into something else. But there are a few projects which were created that do not have functioning code.
Here are some examples I created before Sandboxes were implemented:
https://drupal.org/project/views_styles
https://drupal.org/project/churches
Some others I found:
https://drupal.org/project/bootstrap_framework
https://drupal.org/project/db_export_edit_mysql_row_as_text_and_import
https://drupal.org/project/jedi
https://drupal.org/project/passwindow
https://drupal.org/project/weathercomau
https://drupal.org/project/blockstatus
What are the benefits?
Easier to find modules that will actually work.
What are the risks?
None, if moved to sandboxes. Some risk if old projects are deleted unless the screening process has very clear policy for removal.
How can we measure the impact of this idea? (metrics)
Search by project older than 2010 (when sandboxes were released on d.o) and if there are no releases or unsupported release with low usage.
Who directly benefits from / will use this improvement? (target audiences)
Site builders looking for modules.
Comments
I love this idea phiilbar
There is way too much cruft in the DO closet. And it's a bit amazing to hear this from someone who who like to toss out his old shoes but can't. ;-)
I think the next generation DO website should allow reviews and voting on modules. There have been a few that I would nominate for moving to sandbox status, and some that just need to be archived somewhere else.
OTOH, there are sandbox projects that wait a very long time for approval, and many worthwhile efforts that are abandoned because the approval process can be so difficult.
There are more sandbox projects then there are full projects now.
But your idea should be very easy to implement, even with the current D6 site.
I think this may stifle
I think this may stifle collaborative development where having a full project makes it easier for Drupal users at large to get involved with projects... There seems to be less involvement with Sandbox projects from the community at large...
Creating a module archive
Creating a module archive rather than demotion to a sandbox?
On d.o., these would no longer show on the usage stats pages, excluded from project listings by default, just like sandboxes.
This could automatically archive any abandoned or obsolete modules and issues in the webmaster queue to have other modules placed there. Maybe even archive all projects that do not have a release that is currently supported by core (5.x, 4.7.x, etc)