So is Guildwork frowned upon and shouldn't be used ? It looks neat but I'm not sure I'm willing to risk getting banned for those features.
I started using Guildwork last night, and played the game with it for a few hours. I heard about it on Limit Break Radio, and after they argued both sides of it for a while I figured I'd give it a try.
I think the chat filtering option is nice. I pulled a regular expression off of a Reddit thread to block some RMT messages, and then have been adding websites from the messages that make it through that filter. The interesting thing about that for me anyway is the sheer number of different websites that spam you. I've never really paid much attention to those messages before.
I think the cross zone shouts feature is kind of entertaining, but it comes in handy when people start shouting for hunt invites, which leads me to my next point...
I think the hunts feature is probably the most controversial thing about it. I didn't feel like I was getting notification about hunts any faster personally, but I'm in two hunt linkshells on my server and I'm in a small FC with a friend that is in more than me and he will drop locations in FC chat. I get more hunt notifications from the linkshells than I do from Guildwork. Whether or not people in those linkshells are using it, I have no idea. I didn't see any come through them last night that popped up in Guildwork first, and in fact most of the hunts I did never came through at all (until presumably I arrived).
I'm not to a point where I need to know what instances provide light, so I can't speak to that feature, but I can tell you it changes rapidly.
