(What, Zephyr isn't popular enough to get its own component listing? :-)
I've noticed a couple of minor problems with the display of Zephyr messages.
First: In Zephyr's equivalent of a "group chat", at least as Adium implements it, the "sender" of a message as displayed groups together two pieces of information, the sender, and the Zephyr "instance" field. E.g., if I subscribe to messages in class "help", instance "*" -- that's the magic wildcard string in that field -- and recipient "*" -- the magic string for "everybody", meaning public/group messages, not personal messages for specific users -- and user "joe" sends to class "help" instance "emacs", the message is listed as coming from "joeemacs". (Though the participant's name is still listed as "joe".) I don't have any good idea for a better place to put the instance info, but separating the two with a space would make for easier reading, if it doesn't break anything. (It might be desirable to have a preferences option for breaking down the Zephyr "chat rooms" by instance as well as class, even if the subscription uses the wildcard instance, and it's probably a good thing more often than not, but it won't be the right thing all the time.)
Second: One of the popular early Zephyr clients did a bunch of message formatting using inline formatting commands included by the sender, starting with at-sign. So @i(foo) would show "foo" italicized (on a display device that supports doing so), @b{foo} for bold, etc. There are a handful of commands and a few grouping characters (parens, curly braces, I think square brackets ... that might be all) that can be used after those that take parameters. I don't remember the full set...
But Adium (or Gaim?) seems a bit too aggressive about trying to process these. Some @-sequences that syntactically look like they could be formatting commands, but in fact are not any of the defined commands, seem to be getting "processed" in a way that causes a string to disappear. For example, if I send "foo@mit.edu (or something)", the standard Zephyr client displays "foo@mit.edu (or something)", but Adium shows me "fooor something". I guess something has decided that @mit.edu is supposed to be a command because it starts with "@", and it doesn't do anything, but it and the parens following should go away.
I expect this is not trivial to fix without staring at more Zephyr code, and when I get time (definitely not in the next couple weeks or so), I'd like to try my hand at it. But in the shorter term I'd request a simpler fix, namely a preferences option for turning off all of this formatting processing.
