The title of this blog post, pretty much says it all. Since reading “long” documents or manuals is an extremely hard and time-consuming occupation for most people, I just made this ‘how to’ for all the really lazy people ;-) .

Note: Only register your nickname and get a cloak if you tend to use IRC on a very regular basis
Why should you care about getting a cloak? A cloak hides your hostname. A hostname can be used to the IP address which belongs to it. So if you do not want everyone to know your IP address, get a cloak. Furthermore, a cloak enables IRC channel operators to give a someone an ‘invite’ based on it, instead of a hostname invite. This is extremely usefull if some users have dynamic IP addresses and the operator does not want to change the invite list on a regular basis.

  1. Choose and switch to your (not already registered or occupied) nickname. 
    /nick your_nickname
  2. Register your nickname. 
    /msg nickserv register your_password your@email.address
  3. Hide your e-mail. 
    /msg nickserv set hidemail on
  4. Change to your alternate nickname. I suggest you use, your normal nickname appended with an underscore. 
    /nick alternate_nickname
  5. Link your alternate nickname to your nickname. 
    /msg nickserv group
  6. Switch back to your normal nickname. 
    /nick original_nickname
  7. Check who is currently on-duty. 
    /stats p

    If nobody is on duty, you can get a list of the staffers who could help you out.

    /who freenode/staff/*

    If nobody is on duty, go to #freenode, ask politely for an unaffiliated cloak and wait. Do not request such a cloak repetitively if you do not get an answer immediately, but wait at least 3 hours between requests.

  8. Ask the staffer politely for an unaffiliated cloak.
  9. Set up your IRC client to automatically identify (log in) yourself to nickserv. You can also do this manually: 
    /msg nickserv identify

Source: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml