But without the discussion section we would have never met. I'd never have found out about Troglotopia! That alone was worth the effort participating here.

Edit: Sorry, for constantly correcting my typos.

Thank you all for your precious time and comments!  I knew that most of the people like discussion forum including myself, so I were italki I would have listened to the idea proposed by one of italki's generous members, Richard:)

Miriam, yes, I agree. I have spent some of my best time here especially in discussion section reading and writing comments and thanks to that, I met some nice and helpful people like you:)

Ishtar, ohh yes, you are so right, I never thought about it. they will find a way to look for language partners if the discussion section is removed:D

QuestionMark(?), Hahah. Yes italki appointed me to do some bad changes. But don't let them know that you have figured it out:D

I think it's safe to say that there is a large percentage of users here who are uncomfortable sending messages and/or friend requests to people who they have never interacted with before. For these people, discussion topics for the sole purpose of saying hello to new people serve a very real purpose. I think the evidence of the demand for such topics is quite evident from the state of the discussion board here.

So rather than shutting anything down, I'm with Richard that italki actually needs a new board—one for people to pop in, say hello, and announce to the world that they are open for business. Such a change would require, indeed, change. So for the time being, I have come to peace with our language-partner-request-post posting overlords.