The idea was good, the way it was done isn't. They had much better option to go with, instead of this. I still think a recruitment interface INSIDE the game would have produced far greater results.
Regardless of whether it could fall under any rule, pt's pretty common that some people do this and some people have done it for almost 10 years. I've even had people /tell me daily while I wasn't in an FC.
You don't have to worry about blacklisting that much. It is only people on your world that are likely to blacklist you. When you join cross-world parties, you have the option of joining parties run by people on other worlds who would never see the messages.
Actually see a lot of comments on FC posts in the Community Finder. Maybe the FC advert just isn't interesting enough compared to others.
That is true for many things. For some reason, SE just does certain things outside the game instead. It is true that it is easier to code a website than something in the game, but that doesn't mean this stuff shouldn't be in the game.
True. No question asked.
I've done a bit of code myself and doing a website isn't something hard. I really would like to see an improvement on the FC page interface inside the game too, cause it hasn't changed since at least Stormblood (I only started to play here so, I can't say for ARR or HW.). It deserve some QoL Change and more.