Shoutbox

I managed to get it to work but it looks pretty dodgy


All i did was give all of my contacts custom names, then in the contact list menu go to Plus!> Preferences...> Contact list
where you can unselect the fisrt option which should be 'Display formatting attributes in the contact list (It may not say anything depending on your version of Plus!)

You can make your list look a lot cleaner than mine, I have a lot of large spaces in names because i used custom tags inside the names when re-naming my contacts.
If you rename each of your contats Ctrl+B then (!N) [should look like (!N) ] it should look normal with a slightly bigger than usual space between the online/offline icon and the name.

Edit  A slighly less dodgy pic here

The circled names have custom names of (!N) and they appear to be very close to the correct position.

EDIT2: Typos