Shoutbox

You always need to enclose the text which you want colored.
"[c=x][/c]blahblah" will never work....

Anyways,

What do you exactly mean with your question:
- Do you want a colored nickname?
judging from your last post

or

- When you type messages to a user and you try to color it with a gradient, the gradient codes shows up in the topbar as shown in your screenshot?
judging from your first post


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In case you want a colored nickname:

If you try this in a normal text in a chat, do you then see a colored text? If so, you most likely don't have the correct feature enabled:
Plus! > Preferences > Customize! > Main > Use formatting attributes to color contact names in Messenger Windows.

Note that you need to restart Messenger for this option to take effect.

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In case you typed normal text to be send to your contact and the codes showed up in the topbar: that would be a bug