As part of the dev team of Torum, we clearly understand making the phone number a requirement is actually driving away a lot of potential users. But it is quite an effective way to stop the bots from flooding into the platform. We put user's experience on top of everything else. We don't hope to see Torum becoming another home for trashy and spammy contents. We will remove this requirement when we developed a better way to handle this issue in the future.
Rest assured that Torum will not sell any information from users. Not now, not anytime in future. Feel free to type in any fake phone numbers and pm me on Torum. We can manually verify your account since we know you are a genuine user.
Cheers and have a nice day! Hope to see you soon on Torum! <3
RE: Review of Torum - to subscribe or not