A little earlier than that. When all that controversy first arose over the "Bitcoin XT" client. I can see why it was rejected by the community, but still felt a small minority went about it in a decidedly underhand and deceptive way. Deliberately fudging the numbers to alter perceptions and such.
It's quite trivial to fool the full node trackers (bitnodes, etc) with your UA. You don't even have to run a node to do so.
Might be an attempt to fool those that don't know better, but nodes generally don't represent the sentiments of the community. That is precisely due to the ease of manipulating it.