Let me guess what I think is going to happen later in the summer when the beta is due (or correction, when we finally get a "feature freeze" on the beta). An announcement will be made sometime just before June 20th announcing that the beta will be finished "soon" - but first there is an important environmental initiative we must discuss - save the jellyfish or something - that is much more important.

I hope not but it is easy to become a cynic if you have believed the see more announced schedules here before- or worse if you have based your business plans on what they say here. Still, cynic or not I want to contribute when I can, so here are a few things that come to mind:

-All dating function removable (i.e. no manditory age, sex, etc.) - no cutsie little heart icons, or code that sends people "kisses" that you don't find until too late :-(

-Support for sites using real names. Some use "first name" and "last name", others use "full name" - why not support both of these? For example, let people put "full name" under the member pictures on the member search results, etc.

-Email alerts in "replies" to forum posts (extremely important for lower volume sites, and a major omission in the current Orca).

-Additional searchable fields in the classified ads- include the "top down" search on these fields. Have some good options for paid classifieds.

-Allow members to join "groups" on registration (by multi-select dropdown)

-Multi-word tags. Also, "integrated tag block" (each tag word leads to a single page with everything that has been tagged with that word- profiles, photos, ads, etc.)

-Membership levels. Put everything you can think of in there as it is one of the strengths of Dolphin- all new features and functions should have corresponding membership level permissions. Consider linking levels of the Orca forums to these permissions. For example, a "basic" member could only view Orca forums that allowed viewing by basic members, etc.

-Like others trying to encourage real photos, I don't like the new "avatars" page. Will there be the options for tiny photos for the primary profile photo? Will people have to enter this twice?

-Still no "my blogs" link! Missing in 6.1 also. Very difficult to get to the homepage of your own blog - so no one does. This blog page should have its own static url. (important!- add to trac)

-Custom alerts. I would like to have the ability to have some kind of custom alerts. Lets say a member has some attributes defined in a profile dropdown - or perhaps the profile tags. I'd like to be able to post information (maybe through the "articles" and when it matches the dropdown or tag is put in a special folder for them member and an email alert is generated to that member.

We can mostly have only "user" oriented suggestions now because none of us has seen the backend or the builders section. but any control over the database and how information is distributed to the members would be very helpful.

That's all I can think of right now.

Rob