the reason these don't seem to work is that your examples trigger multiple things.
If you use .notice $nick blah ; you don't see it
If you use notice $nick blah ; you do see it
You CAN use a dot infront of the .hop and .server commands. however once either of those commands are done it starts a series of events that will produce RAW outputs, so your no longer dealing with a single return such as with .notice or .msg
I hope that helped.
