This has been a long standing issue between users of all irc clients, and it basically boils down to personal preference. There was even a time when someone proposed an official protocol to determine whether a notice should be displayed in the active window or relevant windows or hidden away in the status window... but the general concencus is that any priority sytem would be abused and ignored.
It has become standard privmsg text gets displayed in a specific target window (channel or query windows), and notice text gets posed in some location that will quickly grab the user's attention. mIRC's defaults is to display channel notices in the channel, and private notices in each of the channels the sender is in, or in the status window if the user is in none... with the added option of displaying it in your active window too.
If you have a personal preference for another method, it can easily be scripted to meet your needs. That's what scripting is there for, after all.
- Raccoon
