One thing that has always bugged me with the default Blizzard UI is the clunky and inconsistent way that chat channels work. For instance, Party and Guild chat become 'sticky' after you use them, so your next chat line automatically goes back to that channel, but other channels are never sticky. This has been the source of numerous mis-types within the game. PhanxChat fixes that and a bunch of other inconsistencies, plus streamlines your chat display for less clutter.

There's a whole host of useful features, which can be turned on or off, but one of the reasons I love PhanxChat is that it has an intelligent configuration by default. I install it and play, it does all the right things for my preferences. Here's the list of bulleted features:

• Hides the chat scroll buttons.
• Hides the chat menu button.
• Shows the scroll-to-bottom button only when you're scrolled up.
• Enables mousewheels scrolling in the chat frames.
• Moves the chat edit box to the top of the chat frame.
• Enables arrow keys in the chat edit box.
• Disables the flashing effect on chat tabs.
• Locks chat tabs to prevent accidental undocking (hold SHIFT to drag).
• Configures chat text fading.
• Sets the fade-in alpha for chat frames.
• Removes the brackets around player names.
• Colors player names by class, if known.
• Remembers channel colors by name, not number.
• Shortens channel names and chat strings.
• Enables sticky chat for all chat types.
• Suppresses channel leave/join notifications.
• Suppresses repeated messages in public channels.
• Makes URLs in chat clickable for easy copying.
• Colors URLs in chat and adds brackets around them.
• Adds "tell target" functionality.
• Auto-enables chat logging.

That list may seem overwhelming, but it's the simplicity and ease of use with PhanxChat that I love. It just works for me.

Update: A recent version of PhanxChat sets not only all chat channels as 'sticky', but also emotes and whispers. I didn't like whispers included, nor did anyone else in my guild. Although there's no setting within PhanxChat's menus to exclude whispers, there is an easy fix if you're not afraid of a quick edit to the PhanxChat.lua file:

On line 52 of PhanxChat.lua, within the declarations of PhanxChat.stickyTypes, change:
["WHISPER"] = true,
to
["WHISPER"] = false,

You can download PhanxChat from WoWInterface, where it is usually updated most often.

(For more addons that I have recommended, see the list of MMOROG articles with the Addon tag)