There's no need for that. The islower operator or $islower identifier work fine.
It's obvious that he's doing something wrong, trying to give workarounds to see if the $nick is lowercase is futile. My guess is that he kept putting the new on join code after the code he already had, which naturally didn't help at all. I would not be surprised at all if it turned out he had some other auto-voice script/list loaded somewhere.
