If it was up to me, and I realise it isn't but whatever, I'd do away with linkshells in their entirety and replace it with channels. City of Heroes has a good way of dealing with this, allowing you to set up filters and individual chat tabs to talk to your various channels and read what's going on. The whole idea of having to 'equip' a channel was dated even when this idea was first conceived, especially since linkshells are little more than itemized chat rooms.

Players often join multiple linkshells, but to see what's going on in any one of them they have to constantly swap them around. They also have to use up their own inventory space just to equip it! How hard can it really be to set up a channel system that virtually every other MMO has so that players can multi-task a little?