First, you don't need ^ unless you're halting default text
A little note about that, it's not really true.
The ^ prefix means the event is triggered before processing normal events, and before mIRC does its default behavior for that event. Using it in conjunction with /halt(ef) is just the common usage, but it can, for example, be used without /halt(ef) in order to avoid conflict with normal event, it can be useful when helping someone, if the code works with ^ but not without it, it means the user has a normal event preventing the one you gave to work
