Well, what problems are you trying to solve by having the classes all access each other’s data members? Why is that necessary?

Cookies required for the website to work (like that one) are totally fine and, in fact, they don’t even have to ask you about them - if they’re not used for tracking. So no, asking each time is definitely avoidable.

Because you don’t need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that. We don’t need to force FOSS developers to become proficient in everything.

What needs to happen is some kind of tool (ideally FOSS) that lets you spin up an actual forum with the same difficulty to set it up as Discord.

Sorry, I mistakenly assumed you were talking about disk storage - sure, if you’re designing your own solution, definitely use tags! Although the ones Gmail uses aren’t really portable in my experience, so you’re forced to use their mail client. That, however, is pretty much unavoidable if you’re putting a new spin on established protocols like they’re doing - maybe those changes will get picked up by other clients, maybe they won’t, who knows?

That’s true, but since we’re stuck with the file/folder system for all intents and purposes, you should be able to replicate that behaviour by making those tags part of the filenames (like rent_lease_landlordX.pdf) and searching for (parts of) filenames instead. But yes, a dedicated system would of course be preferable.

Why not just use soft links instead?