Yes, the situation arose from the fact that there was technical collaboration on the creation of modding tools, which has already been discussed, and I spent quite a bit of time in a chat room that included such people as Delphy, HP, Tiger (of the hood editor) Johan, Pommes, Murano and Thomas of TSR among others.  Johan, who is Thomas's twin brother is a really nice guy.  I am sure if he was in charge, TSR would have a very different face.

At the beginning, before the chatroom really got off the ground, MSN details were exchanged between myself and the TSR people.  Thomas would occasionally PM me via that, and pass on technical stuff to and from his programmers.  Sometimes he would fish for gossip, and I made it clear I wasn't going to act as any sort of double agent.  One day, in fact the last time I ever had communication with him, he asked whether as a person who seemed fairly neutral between the paysites and the rest of the community what I thought about the feuds between them, and TSR's position in the community   I told him that since he was asking my opinion I felt that TSR's reputation was reasonably good in the days they had all items in rotation and maybe he could go back to something like that.   I also told him I thought it was quite wrong of the owners to have shared customers' personal data with people other than admins (ie creators etc), and that this was a huge part of the loss of TSR's reputation.   He responded that he felt it was entirely justified to have shared this information with creators whose work was being stolen.   The conversation ended soon after that and we haven't spoken directly since.