on *:text:!news:#: if ($istok(%friend,$nick,32)) { msg $nick test %news } [/code]

since %freind is a space seperated list of nicks, you must see if $nick is one of the tokens (nicks) in the list, the list of tokens has spaces (ascII 32) seperating each one, so
$istok(%friend,$nick,32) becomes true in $nick is in %friend, before u were checking if $nick was the same as the whole list.

This does not confront the issue of them identifing to the server