Shaggie you can still use the irc style formatting...for some reason the panels only parse BBcode, this might be bettered in future versions.
However there is one panel that does parse irc style coding, if you got that set in preferences as the format to use, and that's when in a conversation you type ctrl+r. So you can set your nick from there as usual with /nick<space><ctrl+r><newnickhere><enter>
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