User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-436956-20100903203921/@comment-1915803-20100904145659

It's not only used for spam. Sure, a lot of people just say "hi!" and so forth, but there are still a lot of useful discussions that take place in shoutboxes. Plus, you can't judge all wikis' shoutboxes if you've just seen a few which contain spam messages.

And using an admin's talk page is fine, but the shoutbox is a lot faster.