It becomes a Private (or semi-private) chat.
Here is the use case. You know person X is on the site/forum. You send them an invite to join a chat.
PersonX is happily surfing the forum, and gets a notification on page refresh (Like PM) & asks them to join a chat. That link brings them to the shout box page.
The shout box can be a 'party line', where if you happen to enter it when others are chatting.. you see their conversation. Otherwise, the matrix of complexity would be too much for most users.
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