Some questions.
1. Anybody has an even vague idea of how it would look like?
2. Would old submitted projects remain, or do we have to submit them again?
3. Would submitted projects await approval or do they instantly appear?
Only the staff know and does it frankly matte to much? They've already said it will probably come about the time of 1.8 which means themes will be broken and plugins maybe as well.
I imagine it will look like the rest of the site with the new design also coming with 1.8.
Not sure about the last one but security>speed in this instance IMO.
1) Have a look at this blog post:
http://blog.mybb.com/2012/08/05/mods-site-tour/
2) I currently don't know this, but I would assume all old submissions are kept.
3) There is a system for trusted developers to not need to wait for approval.
1. The plan is to make everything look like the 1.8 theme but you can see some screenshots on our blog (though it's using the current site theme).
2. That's been internally discussed and we want to archive everything, so old data can still be accessed. However, since MyBB has the "Plugin Updates" feature, we need to find the best way to make sure we can have a link between old data and new projects (e.g. NewPoints 1.9.6 and the NewPoints project that will be created when the new mods site is released, so if I release 1.9.7, users will be notified regardless of it being on a different mods site). This needs to be thought properly, because we don't have a guid anymore, we use codenames instead. But we'll have a way for users to enter the guid and assign it to a project to allow new updates to match old plugins. It's kind hard to explain for me.
3. "Approved Developers" will see their projects instantly approved. The other projects will need to pass the approval process.