18:23 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: I'll comment in a sec as soon as the +w numbers settle
18:25 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: Okay....our problem was this: our system for labeling Tor nodes was very inflexible and fairly inaccurate. We'd need that system either to support Tor nodes or to block them. We choose to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Tor privacy project, but in this case that decision didn't really affect things.
18:25 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: The system we were using to label the nodes was really the best we could do without running a Tor client, and until recently we didn't have the go-ahead to run that client on the sponsor's server where it needed to run.
18:26 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: We received the go-ahead yesterday, which was good, because today the old system (based on a web site) broke down, because its associated Tor client went offline.
18:27 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: Meanwhile, we've been receiving a lot of Tor-based clonebot attacks lately, which I'm assuming based on past experience is probably intended as a bit of social engineering; if we support Tor, they presume they can attack the network; if we block Tor, even temporarily, certain folks can claim we're not supporting it properly. It's a bit of a catch-22.
18:28 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: Our outage in the Tor-labeling service could not have come at a more unfortunate time. So, yesterday, we received a go-ahead to run Tor clients on our sponsor's servers, and we've installed Tor, and are using it directly to label our Tor clients. There's probably still a bit of latency, but not too much.
18:30 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: I should stress that we probably could have simply klined most of our Tor users, using a less-than-accurate list, with some chance of false-positives, but that didn't seem to be a very fair thing to do. Instead, we've been working on the problem for the past few hours, and letting users in intermittently, every few minutes, on an unpredictable basis, so that people could get in without the botnets having a chance to ramp up.
18:31 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: This approach wasn't perfect, but we didn't remove any users from freenode; everyone who was able to (some 25,000 users) remained connected while we worked on the problem.
18:34 [freenode] -!- WALLOP lilo: Apologies to everyone for the inconvenience, and we'll continue to work on ways to reduce the effectiveness of various attacks on the network. Thank you *very* much for using freenode!