You don’t have to share phone numbers, and we probably wouldn’t recommend that (I’ve never shared my personal phone number to someone online).
I wouldn’t recommend it personally, but you can use the forum to communicate with each other or an external platform such as Matrix or Discord.
Yeah, that’s completely understandable! I doubt it’s a simple error to fix and there’s a lot of things to work on at the moment.
Could you file the bug on GitHub for us?