There's a new feature in Firestorm that you might find useful called Chat Snooze.
You can read more about it and other chat features in Firestorm's help wiki, but let me give you the TL;DR.
Let's say that a group chat comes in and you close the chat window. If a new message comes in, Firestorm won't open the chat window back up. You might miss something important that way, like a Dance Queens chat announcement.
However, let's say that a group chat comes in and you use Chat Snooze. That's the Zz button in the upper-right corner of a chat window.
Firestorm will close the chat window for a period of snooze time. Then, if a new message comes in after that time, Firestorm will open the chat window again.
The default snooze time is 900 seconds (15 minutes), but you can change that in Preferences >> Chat >> Chat Window >> Group Chat Snooze Duration.
This is useful if you're wanting to avoid some short-term chatter, but you still want to go back to getting group chat messages after a while.
Another option I use is the Group Chats checkbox under Preferences >> Chat >> Enable incoming chat popups. I turn that off so I only see the group chatter when I have the Conversations window open.
Anyway, thought y'all might find these useful.
What options do you use to manage the storm of messages?