Bash craft have this only player's near 100 blocks around you can read it.And you can hear them too.Its called the Clanchat plugin.Its not very new.But oke
No. That just gets annoying as you can't talk to your friends.
I would prefer a system where everyone starts in global chat, but you can have a command to switch to local, which would have coloured text but only 100 blocks or whatever.
If you started in local, newbies would freak that nobody could hear them (Once they got a little away from spawn).