My suggestion is that you should have the ability to remove instant message notifications from certain topics.
I usually keep the instant messenger open to know when someone pm's me or posts in my trade topics, but a downside is that I created a few topics in other forums around here that have nothing to do with trading, and I don't give a crap if anyone posts in them.
This is extremely annoying.
I'm considering throwing the IM out the window until this is fixed.
I get these blipblops evey minute and I have no way of knowing if they are for me, or if that's just someone bragging about their 10-0 Dota 2 game.
I can only imagine what it's like for people with several popular topics around the forum.
If it's not at all possible to remove this feature from certain topics, I suggest you change it to only notify you if your thread is in a trading section. Getting IM's because someone is posting in a GC thread is just silly.