After some fiddling around, I've found a method of arranging chat channels that works reasonably well for me. After trying to explain it to someone on-line with I'm not entirely sure what degree of success, it occurred to me to try to whack together a tutorial using screenshots to show what I mean.

A screenshot I took of my CoH desktop can be found here, if you want to get the overall view of what I'm doing with it. (It's about 600K in size, which is why I didn't use an img tag to link it in-line here.) Now I'm going to describe what I did to make it that way, and how it works. For this demonstration, I'm going to assume you've already joined at least one of the up to five global chat channels you are allowed to have.

1) Click a number, any number. As long as it's one of the numbers at the top of your main chat tab, and there's nothing else in it, anyway. As you can see here, I clicked on 3.



2) Click the "Add Tab" button in the middle of the window.



3) Add one of the channels to which you are subscribed to this tab. This should be self-explanatory: click the name in the right-hand tab and then click the "<< Add" button. Type a special name for the tab, if you like. Click "OK".



4) Right-click on the window and select Add Tab. I can't show the context menu dialogue because screenshot won't capture it properly; I assume you'll be able to find it, however. Repeat step 3 as many times as you have channels. (Note that if you've already used more than 5 tabs in setting up your chat windows elsewhere, you may run out of tabs before you run out of channels. If the context menu won't let you add another tab, you'll have to delete one you already have before you can continue.) When you're done, your window should look something like this:



5) Right-click on one of those tabs and select "Send to Bottom" from the menu that appears. Your window will split into two segments and one of the tabs will migrate down to the bottom. You can send up to 4 of your tabs there. When you're done, your window might look something like this:



Here's another example, taken from the screenshot I mentioned earlier, showing how I have my chat pane positioned between my map above and my Insp tray/power bars below.



We're not done yet, however.

6) Click the "A" icon above your text entry bar. You can't really see it too well in this screenshot, but it's right below the "a" in "Firebaine:".



This sends your chat bar content to the Default Channel of whatever tab your focus is on—that is, whatever tab you last clicked into. Notice how the prompt in the chat bar there is "Taxi:" That means that I last clicked into my "Taxi" tab, so whatever I type will go into my "Taxi" tab.

If you plan to use this method, I would suggest right-clicking in your main chat window and setting the Default Channel to team chat, which is probably where you would be anyway the majority of the time you play CoH (or, at least, the majority of the time it is important to be able to type text to someone else on the fly, if you habitually solo). That will let you leave your chat in Active Tab mode and be speaking to your team most of the time, and just hit /l whenever you want to chat to local or /sg to supergroup.

"But wait," you might say. "How will I know if there's activity in a channel if it's in one of the tabs I'm not currently viewing?" The answer is simple. You will notice that in some of the screenshots above, the names of some tabs are in white, and others are in grey? The ones in white are the ones that have had recent activity since you last viewed them. Thus, it would probably be best for you to keep the most active channels on tabs in the foreground and the ones that hardly ever have anything on them at all in the background, where you can click over to them and check them if they become white.

And needless to say, you can also open a second chat window and drag one or more of those tabs over to it if you really need to keep track of more than two channels in realtime.

The one problem with this method is that you may occasionally end up sending text to the wrong place if you forget to click into the right pane before speaking. Still, it's a lot easier than having to memorize or re-bind commands to send text to particular channels, especially when you don't know for sure that you're going to keep the same channels day in and day out.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful, or at least not too confusing. If you have any questions, you can probably find me on the LJ channel as @Purramedic if I'm logged in.

hey look, there's me talking to Pyschoboy, I feel all famous and stuff being in a tutorial :D

I have been wondering this for the longest time, and I have just got to know: what anime is that icon from?

It's called Godannar, I myself haven't seen it, but I saw this pic, and thought that it just HAD to be made into an avatar.

I *still* crack up every time I see that icon. XD I sooooooo wanna know what the context of it is though. ^_^

Woo! We're famous!

And this got Memoried. Go us!

In that link to your fullscreenshot, it mentions "You recieved Wedding Band." What is that?

Well, there's this story arc where you get married...

STRIGA ISLAND SPOILERS


SPOILERS


SPOILERS


STOP READING NOW


SPOILERS







OK, no, seriously, it's a temp power you get for completing all the missions for Stephanie Peebles, the first Striga Island contact. 2 hour total duration; +Res (All). Manifests as a blue flame around you when you have it on.

I used a few minutes' worth during the Sister Psyche TF I was in shortly afterward. Kept me from dying those times I rounded the corner and smacked into a horde of Freak Tanks at point blank range...

Thanks R_M! Now, maybe I can parse out Global Chat after all... ;)

(Man, I'm lazy about such things....)

We're getting global chat (at last) in the EU with issue 6.

Should I infer that there is no way to list the current extant public channels?

You should indeed, for there is none. To the point where there are even official bulletin board threads on the USA board for the purpose of listing said channels.

Damn. Seems an odd decision to me, but there you go. I guess we'll make do.