Canned messages are exceedingly lame.
Spam and blather is most useless at best.
The chat system and text manipulation in general could be far better by making it on par with any modern mush code. Such as: the IRClike use of /me replaced with mud/mush shortcut of :. People want shortcuts? It doesn't get shorter than that for an emote. Add the @emit function of TinyMUX as a standard chat function. Add a way to have /0 chat output choked on items that should be stifling output (ie: gags). In fact, have the communications box able to target a channel directly with a dropdown arrow. None of these things are terribly hard and result in a much higher quality game play for literates than the newest wiz bang supa gloss widget that needs a new video card to use.
Additional input buffer space on a toggle would be very useful for people who'd like to take a few minutes and write a story. Seeing quality roleplay encouraged by the code would be fantastic. Other things like a built in emote targetting system and syntax are exceedingly easy to add and working examples of a properly setup system can be found at armageddon.org.
Finally, easily used whisper code on the client, pemote and so on, all with long standardized shortcuts found on muds/mushes and not clonealike commands from mIRC. Many of us don't even use Windows and a great many of the older crowd cometh directly from text based roleplaying games. Please give us back what we lost to come here. The young folks will like it. It'll improve game play immensely.