Question: how echolot determines reliability of middlemen

[Hermes Admin]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I'm trying to figure out why hermes has suddenly lost a lot of reliability 
in the last few days. I had 4 days of 90-100% and then I dropped to 30-60% 
for a few days.

My question is how echolot determines the reliability of middlemen. Since 
any message going through a middleman subsequently goes through another 
exit node, how does echolot separate the reliability of the middleman vs. 
the exit node? Does the reliability of the random exit node affect the 
stats for the middleman?

Thanks for all the help.
:hermes admin
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/XgFkFFmH6+jLOrERAoDHAKCYgh7zQ1v+u0RdIj1ioHLZ8RUJKACgt8cn
4v7b2bGt8ennjl1TE2BEtmY=
=2ptK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----