I'm not sure what you are seeing, or the context, but often the ! is used in "grab lines"
like "To get my text on the growth rate of chickens type or paste to channel !chickens"
after you have posted the !chickens that person might send you chickenpaper.txt
other characters are often used as well, and with more generic things often you must specify the users nick (or be sent 20 copies of chickenpaper.txt)
like !nickname chickenpaper.txt
