My take on the family tribe situation is that no, SPQR is not a family tribe with AOTS. If they were, they would have told all their allies that an alliance with SPQR meant an alliance with AOTS and that launching on them meant war with SPQR.
They do seem to to be more than just normal allies, but to call them a family would be wrong. Families take care of each other.
The recruit button was hit awfully quickly when I lobbed a few fakes at EnglishSpy or whatever his name is. There has also been some other evidence given about people founding things and relationships and blah blah blah... it does seem that there is a lot of reason to think there are very close ties between the tribes. It doesn't really matter, though. If they were really a family tribe then SPQR would have declared on TFF for launching on AOTS. End of story.
As for the spying accusations - Larix was unbanned. That's it. He was not "proven innocent". Being unbanned does not mean there was no spying. As I recall, larix has a brother who used to play w3 but no longer does. If said brother logged in to peterpiper (or larix did and said it was his brother) then it would look like dual accounting to the mods. Both accounts would be banned, as indeed they were, but he could get out of it when he says it was his brother. Do I know that this is how he appealed? No. It's just a guess. Regardless of what actually happened, though, being unbanned does not prove SPQR innocent of spying. It simply means the mods could not show that he was dual accounting. There was enough evidence for them to make the initial ban so it seems reasonable to assume that there were logins from the same ip address. Egg also knows that there were people logging and interrupting the sit, reading the forums, not doing anything on the account and then handing it back. Even though larix was unbanned, I think it's pretty reasonable for egg to think that larix was spying on Egg using the peterpiper account, even if he had someone else do the logging in so no rules were broken. If larix wants to prove otherwise, perhaps he should share his correspondence with the mods on the forums. That might convince people there was no spying, but given the evidence... well... it will be a tough sell.