David,
My relay was harvesting .onion addresses and I apologize if that breaks any rule or ethical guideline.
I'm a Junior Researcher at the Laboratory of Security and Cryptography at University of Campinas. We were conducting some research on malicious Hidden Services to study their behavior and how we could design a tool that could tell malicious and benign Hidden Services apart.
Because we focus mainly on web pages, we use a crawler to get almost all of the data we need. However, there are some statistics (such as the size of the Tor network, how many HSs run HTTP(s) protocol, how many run other protocols and which protocols do they run, etc) which cannot be obtained through a crawler. That's why we were harvesting .onion addresses.
We would run a simple portscan and download the index page, in case it was running a web server, on a few random addresses we collected. We would also try and determine the average longevity of those few HSs. However, after collecting the data we needed for statistical purposes, the .onion addresses we collected would be deleted and under no circumstances we would disclose the information we collected on a specific .onion address we harvested. In addition, we would never target specific harvested HS, but only a random sample.
We would like to keep running our relay. We can make this process as transparent as possible without disclosing any information that would harm the anonymity of any user. We could also comply with any demands that the Tor authorities might have. In case that's not possible, we will completely respect your decision and will no longer harvest .onion addresses. However, I'd like to ask for our IP address range to be unbanned so that other people at my university can conduct some other research in the future and so we can run a regular relay :)
I appreciate the time you took to address this issue and I'm willing to answer any questions you may have.
Much obliged,
Marcus.