Fowarder tool aims to define a set of links for documentation or sharing purpose.
You can add/delete/edit links. Such link item list can be saved in a text file allowing define a contribution as a documentation forwarder. Also you can establish if edition pane group will be visible after saving action and reloading the actual contribution.
In U8, Forwarder was defined as a platform too, so you can decide to fork a forwarder and build an item link list as a contribution for sharing documentation and contents.
As special case if you build a forwarder contribution with only one link/reference, it will acts as a direct forwarder without need of showing a list.