You can't use $snicks in a dialog. $snicks is only valid inside a routine associated with a channel window, such as channel popups or a command/alias typed in the channel editbox. A dialog, however, is not associated with any channel window (active or not), as far as mirc is concerned. That's what $snick(#channel) is there for, use that instead. $snick($chan(1)) , for example, returns the selected nicknames in the 1st channel.