I was thinking this morning it would be good if the chatterbox had some highlighting to indicate if someone has written or responded to you. My suggestion is this:

1. The input field goes red when someone in the chatterbox writes a message to you using [name]
2. The text that the person wrote to you goes red also.

I believe this would have quite a positive effect on communications for four reasons:

1. You'll be able to tell when there is an answer or something relating to you in the chatterbox without having skim read all the contents. At a glance you'll be able to see "Oh, this is for me!".

2. It will by default train people to use the [name] tagging if they are writing to someone, and hence making communication in the chatterbox more efficient and easy.

3. Sometimes if you reading posts or doing other things in PerlMonks besides paying attention to the chatterbox you could miss something someone writes to you because they've see you as a "User Online". The higlighting would draw your attention to the fact that someone in the chatterbox just wrote something relating to you.

4. This increased use of name tagging in the chatterbox could mean it gets used for points by tracking when someone is responding to someone else (although idle chatter by bored geeks could see them racking up endless points - so this last point lacks possible merit).

All in all though I feel the idea is credbile and I can't envisage being too hard to implement. Thoughts/comments?