I was just wondering if there was a way to set people as mains and alts without ever using the character names.

For example, in my guild we tend to call each other by our real names or nicknames, so using character names is a little impersonal. Our public notes are mainly set up like "Name's Main" and "Name's Alt". Short enough to leave room for more info in the rest of the note.

Would there be a way to detect this and group people together if they have the same name in their note, or does there NEED to be the name of the main character in there somewhere?

Not possible without recoding. You'd have to recode altmonitor to parse and store the real names for the mains and match to that column for the alts.

Yeah I have the same problem here, we use our message board's nickname in the notes, not the in game main char's name, Let me see if I can play around with the code