It was after. It was near the end of mining, the hashrate went insane. I mean utterly insane, I've never seen so many SCRYPT hashes in one place and there was a genuine cause for concern at the time. It was at around 4.5mil I think.
What is funny is people have no problem with changing coins to scrypt-n or x11 to combat the ASIC beasts but changing the number of coins or ending mining early to combat multipools? How dare they!
Never bite the hand that feeds you. Ofcourse this, at that time this small community, would like to see increase in their percentage by just a single change.