the thing is what will happen to members network of friends on the forum who may not border in sharing personal contacts e.g email if one day the forum suddenly goes offline how do we link up with each other and keep the discussion going.
I believe a lot of members who connected here have contacted each other on some other platform, preferably one which members can maintain their privacy on, like discord, telegram, signal etc. If the forum does go offline, they can continue correspondence on those platforms and possibly use that link to contact mutual friends.