Any ideas about the AQ War Effort?
According to the Onyxia opening Forum post
March 30th, Phase 3.5 will begin the preparations for the AQ Gates.
April 27th, Phase 4 will unleash Ahn’Qiraj, depending on player progress.
we can assume the quest series and collection of materials should be according to what it was.

My few cents on this topic is, the knowledge of which and how many materials is needed killed the fun for the event on the classic servers, virtually every server prefarmed and just dropped it in the first few hours.
In vanilla we had a progression website from blizzard where you could see the progression of every server and since no one knew beforehand, it was fun to battle other servers. Granted, we only have one server.

As a middle ground i would propose a guild highscore.
We get a nice little progress page on the warmane homepage of guilds and there "donated" war efforts. (If you turn something in with a char in a guild, your guild gets credit)
As for the materials.... changing them might upset a lot of people, or it might make it fun since we now need to scramble to get everything to open the gates.
Tough call.
At least turn alliance and horde stuff around but dont tell anyone, with that change you can still use everything farmed beforehand but you need to find someone of the other faction to trade it.

Code:
Both factions had to gather a total of:
90,000  Copper Bar (1 signet per turn in)
26,000  Purple Lotus (7 signets per turn in)
80,000  Thick Leather (7 signets per turn in)
17,000  Spotted Yellowtail (7 signets per turn in)
400,000  Runecloth Bandage (10 signets per turn in)

The Alliance also had to gather:
180,000  Light Leather (1 signet)
800,000  Linen Bandage (1 signet)
110,000  Medium Leather (3 signets)
33,000  Stranglekelp (3 signets)
14,000  Rainbow Fin Albacore (3 signets)
28,000  Iron Bar (5 signets)
20,000  Roast Raptor (5 signets)
600,000  Silk Bandage (5 signets)
24,000  Thorium Bar (10 signets)
20,000  Arthas' Tears (10 signets)

The Horde also had to gather:
96,000  Peacebloom (1 signet)
10,000  Lean Wolf Steak (1 signet)
22,000  Tin Bar (3 signets)
250,000  Wool Bandage (3 signets)
19,000  Firebloom (5 signets)
60,000  Heavy Leather (5 signets)
18,000  Mithril Bar (7 signets)
250,000  Mageweave Bandage (7 signets)
60,000  Rugged Leather (10 signets)
10,000  Baked Salmon (10 signets)
thoughts?