We had similar complaints about the shoutbox last Spring Training. The system only works if their software is intelligent enough to track shouts relevant to the current post and, even then, it only works if you've got a community that prefers shouts to posting comments. Neither of which is true here. And, as wish pointed out, the wrong shoutbox loads at least half the time, and the shouts are polluted with comments that are not from this community.
I, frankly, think Klat should recognize that each individual community leader (that would be you, Doc) should have the ability to adjust the experience his or her users get in the content of the site. They should be able to limit shouts to a whitelist of recognized community members or including a keyword (we call all shout beginning with #SSI, for example), and they should be able to choose whether they wanted shouts by subject or by post or just one box for their neighborhood.
And the shoutbox, as it stands now, doesn't do what we need it to do. We have your posts to control organized conversations on specific topics. We used the shoutbox to relay news and information or have a general discussion about the team or other group members or politics or whatever we are currently gabbing about that is 'off-topic' to any of the posts. I think Klat's basic model is flawed...they're creating a way to converse that humans don't tend to create for themselves, which is usually a bad sign. We don't tend to talk to each other by yelling into a room of thousands of strangers. We either (a) make statements into the void and hope they are passed on (Twitter model), (b) talk to our friends (facebook model), or (c) talk about specific topics (forum/blog post model), or (d) talk to our communities in smaller community meetings/parties/social gatherings (old shoutbox model).