The four things Blizzard promised and did not date
The announcement that opened the doors on 17 September is short, and four sentences in it are still outstanding eleven days later.
The level cap. It was set to 20 at the start and will be raised to 30 "later in the beta". That is the whole statement: no date, no build, no condition. Our own bar at the top of every page carries the current number, and it will keep carrying 20 until somebody here changes it by hand - because there is nothing to read it off.
More zones, dungeons and the battleground. Additional zones, dungeons and the new battleground "will open for testing as the beta continues". Which ones is not written anywhere. Week one opened with the Skyborne and Zephras Isle, Hall of Thanes at 13–18 and Ruins of Lordaeron at 15–20.
The Server Slam. At some point the servers open for several hours to anyone at all, without a purchase and without an invitation. It is the one free route into the client that does not depend on a lottery, and it has no date either.
The end. The beta runs "through October 21, the last full day of testing". The roadmap graphic Blizzard published alongside it says 22 October. Both are Blizzard's own; neither has been corrected. We count to the 21st, because a sentence is more specific than a bar on a chart.
What is reported rather than announced
Two things arrived this week that Blizzard did not put in a news post.
The quest log doubled from 20 to 40 slots during the second week. The reason it matters is entirely about the cap: at 20 you run out of level before you run out of quests, and a bigger log lets you park the leftovers until the cap moves. This comes from players, not from a patch note.
Blizzard expanded the beta server capacity a second time, after queues of an hour or more. That is reported in the press and visible to anyone who queued; it is not in any official note.
Neither is in doubt. Both are in the "reported" column because the standard this site holds itself to is where a statement came from, not how sure we personally are about it.
What is guessed, and how to spot it
Search for the level cap right now and you will find 1 October given as the date it rises, phase two described as starting that day, and a list of the dungeons it will open - Deadmines, Wailing Caverns, Shadowfang Keep, Excavation Site, City of Dalaran.
None of that is Blizzard's. It is a reasonable reconstruction: take the level ranges those dungeons have at launch, assume the test walks up them in order, and a cap of 30 lands you at the Excavation Site and Dalaran. The date is arithmetic - week three of a five-week test.
It may well turn out right. It is still a guess, and the tell is that the guess is more precise than the announcement it is based on. Blizzard wrote a sentence with no date in it; a page that answers "when" with a specific Thursday has added something.
What follows for anything you read this week
The cap is the filter. This client stops at level 20 today and at 30 after the raise, which means no level 40 talent build, no level 45 dungeon route and no raid boss order has been tested in it. Darkspear Islands has not been played by anybody, because the battleground is not in the test. Barrow Deeps and Hyjal Summit do not open until 9 December.
That does not make those guides worthless - a talent tree can be read out of the client to level 60 whether or not you can walk there. It does mean the difference between "read out of the files" and "tried out" is the difference that matters for the rest of this test, and most pages do not mark it.