That is not true. Noone can recive them without a quest.
If you want to collect shards as fast as possible - go with pugging. If you don't want to gather pugs (who can be pretty annoyng sometimes) when solo. And consider voidspark's advise
Also: if you try to share quest on the shards it will tell you if you have someone with the same quest in your group (it will not share quest though).