Let me make one final comment here, because the opening comment set the tone that all I wanted was a critique of my site, and that was not my reason for posting this. While most of the comments here pointing out the various ways my site sucks were constructive , do you see what is missing? Not one person came here and said "hey Rob, check out my site, it is highly engaging and the users love it". No one even was able to give an example of a site that was not theirs and said something see more like "check out this site - see how awesome it is".

Even the head of Boonex came here with this "blame the site developers" approach and while he also gave some constructive advice was also unable to point to a single example of a really successful site built with this software. I just spent some time looking at the site directory here, with special attention to the "featured" site. The first thing I noticed it that section hasn't even been updated in more than a year. Several of them now lead to broken links, one has been banned from this site, and several don't even seem to be using Boonex technology, having replaced it with something else.

I also looked at all the "popular" sites - but even most of them don't have many members, and even the ones that do don't seem to have much recent activity. From those entire two lists, I only saw two or maybe three sites that could come even close to being labled "a success".

The Social Engine site I mentioned in this post continues to grow at a good clip, but it is not the growth that makes me jealous - it is the user engagement. On the Social Engine site they brag that you can develop a site quickly and get immediate user engagement - and I think they have kept that promise. With Dolphin, on the other hand, it will take weeks or even months just to configure, and them you will almost certainly find that you have to do serious code modification to get functionality you might have thought would have been there in the first place - it is an exhausting technology to try to make work in the real world.

Almost all of the advice here is visual - how to make it look like I have an engaging site, not how to make my site actually engaging. I have looked at Dolphin 7.1 and to tell you the truth it seems like more of the same - it will "look" much better, but I am not positive it will be that much better. There are still many things I like about Dolphin - the profile fields builder is great, the feature set is second to none, but it's a little like the marketing executives who designed the perfect dog food and then discover that "the dogs just don't like it".