I know that when I fiddled with places code at one point, a thing I added was so that if you put angle brackets <around something>, that'd end up as a general emit (like if you did +mutter and those things happened to pass through). That way, if it were a setup where you're waving your arms around while talking, doing some elaborate pantomime that a bystander might figure out (but somehow talking quietly enough that it wouldn't leave the place), you could cover that without having to do a 'for everyone else' pose.
I thought it was a charming idea, since it wasn't mandatory and was instead an added little, "If you want to make it a bit more funky" thing; if I recall, nobody used it.
+Phones, I only really like for calling a place, in case you want to get someone in that room, but you don't care who you get (but you also don't want to mass-page everyone to work out who'd answer the phone). Alas, this means folks setting up if their room can be called (EG: Moe's Bar? Yes. Count Dooky's Secret Chapterhouse? Not so much), which few folks want to do.
