I'm trying to understand a script offered to me for the purpose of processing JOIN messages in different ways for different classes of users identified by differing access levels.

A few snippets of code to illustrate:

on ^1!:JOIN:#:{
msg $chan Welcome to the channel, $nick
}
on ^100!:JOIN:#:{
msg $nick Thanks for returning, $nick
}

I can't find a reference to the "^" access level prefix in the mIRC Help file, and while I see nothing in the script that appears likely to have any bad behavior such as file deletion or other obviously bad behavior, I don't like to run any script I don't fully understand. I'm also puzzled by the trailing "!" following the access levels, as that doesn't seem to match the Help file description of a "!" suffix.

Any clarification would be appreciated.