your social network and dating script provider

There's been some time since my last development news so I thought I should bring everyone not involved in the forum up to date.

We had a week of delay because my credit card was "hacked" and all money taken from it.
Since I am such a control freak, development was slow without me around.

To solve the problem of the private member items (photos, blogs, videos, etc) which is an underdeveloped feature right now I proposed a simple solution to our customers: friends should have access to private items, others should not. Of course, this lead to 3 pages of answers over 2 days and the discussion still going strong. Opinions are split but most appear to agree with a default simple solution which could later be expanded with an addon for Etano community builder. Social network type of sites would probably need a more involved solution with user networks and groups while for dating sites probably the default solution would be enough.

An older discussion about the speed of user to user messages has surfaced - I agree that something should be done about it. If possible we might even do something about it in v1.13.

Some interesting stuff about fake profiles: should you try to jumpstart your site with fake profiles or not? My advice? It doesn't matter as long as you keep your dating/SN site active with users (fake or not) (appearing to be) involved in the site.

As if my credit card problem wasn't enough, we're having problems finishing an important feature added for v1.13: a new profile fields system.
As you probably know, Etano community builder lets you define your own profile fields (questions). Until now the field types were limited to textboxes, textareas, select boxes, checkboxes and 2 more complex fields: dates and locations.
We rewrote this functionality so it can be extended with whatever type of fields you could possibly dream of. Well, the user part of this feature is complete and kicking but the admin part - the actual generation of the field information is giving us some headaches. We're progressing but kind of slow. And I left this at the end thinking that it's going to be the easy part...

So that's pretty much it. If you want to know more head over to the forums or post a comment here.