we already started the conversation on GitHub a while ago and as we were discussing the list of important topics to include in the upcoming hardfork we want to collect your opinion about it.
Problems
Long running auctions
Long running auctions of short names might never end. Whenever a new bid is placed (e.g. right before the auction would end), the timeout of the auction kicks in again and currently we would have to wait again until the timeout (depending on the name length, see https://github.com/aeternity/protocol/blob/master/AENS.md#protocol-fees-and-protection-times) would expire to finally get the name. This can be repeated in an endless way.
Waiting for 2 months to get a bid for short names finished
We definitely want to address this topic in the upcoming Ceres hardfork.
Long running auctions
The short term solution for the upcoming Ceres hardfork could be a change in the way we treat the timeout after the auction started. So if the auction for example is in a rough time-window of 3 keyblocks we could repeat that timeout for every new bid
Waiting for 2 months
I propose to just stick to max. 480 keyblocks (~24 hours). Nobody wants to wait 2 months to get a name and meanwhile we have different ways of discovery. So if anybody cares about the names this shouldn’t be a problem.
As you said, spending two months waiting for an auction is obviously very long, and users do not have the patience to wait for such a long time. This limits the popularity of aens to some extent. I recommend setting the auction time for any aens to be 24 hours.
I think not only the time, but also the auction price needs to be changed. As the price of Ae rises, the cost of registration will become larger and larger. If the price of Ae rises to $100 in the future, it will cost more than $8000 to register a five character domain name, which is a large amount and will hinder the popularity of domain names
I think we can adapt the price later on if æternity finally gets the popularity it deserves (again). for the moment the auction mechanism is the biggest problem.
also the prices used to be way higher in the past. I mean look at the all time high of Æ … so it’s pretty cheap right now
independent of that we might want to revisit the auction mechanism completely in the future. this is a short term solution to fix the biggest problem
we will quite certainly open a governance vote for that topic where we can decide on the auction duration and the “bumping interval”. might be even two separate votes.
personally I prefer 24 hours - you could have some notification services and the new upcoming explorer will show all the AENS names directly which expire shortly. 3 days is quite a long time IMO. and if there is competition we will have the bumping interval anyway (but here the price will increase for each vote :))
I have been looking forward to the emergence of the Aens exchange. This will greatly increase the popularity of Aens. Regrettably, no Aens project appeared at this hackathon.
no timeline yet - we will announce when the time has come!
but we had some discussions about what needs to be included there and the AENS topic here is quite important IMO. I will try to set up the vote and coordinate with marketing over the upcoming weeks.
@marco.chain Did you know that Chinese users cannot access US platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.? Please share more about AE updates here when you have time. Thank you.
@peache314 Yes, I am developing, I have been developing for some time, I am rewriting AEBox now, so there is some delay in time, but it will be finished soon, I will inform you when the development is finished
why does an “central” (?) exchange have to list AENS names? I guess if that ever happens the AENS names will be wrapped into the “official” NFT standard and traded across NFT marketplaces.
but we can have a specific, clean and cool AENS marketplace that does not rely in any way on sth. centralized. in addition to that I don’t see a need for that. I would never send my AENS name to a central entity
… so it’s pretty cheap right now 
